Well I've repeatedly been feasting my eyes on the new Skyrim gameplay demo fresh from E3 and I can safely say no game has excited me as much as this. Seriously I'm quivering at the mere thought... maybe it's early onset parkinsons though... anyway, I thought I'd try and add my own humble piece to the general hubbub and excitement surrounding what promises to be a social-life shattering experience:
5) The new game engine and AI: Now I'm not the tech-est of people but even I found the news of the new game engine powering Skyrim pretty damn exciting. For one thing the engine powering Oblivion and Fallout 3 could make a pretty inconsistent gaming experience (at times seemless and inspired, at times flat and, dare I say, tedious). Now don't get me wrong, I cherish both those games and rate them so highly but the new Creation engine has massively improved draw distances, insane levels of detail and extremely beautiful and dynamic lighting. Now for the AI... This drove me mental in Oblivion (For example today, playing Oblivion, a BLIND moth priest uttered "I need to stop drinking ale, I'm SEEING (!!!) things!" then proceeded to walk at the wall non-stop, then when returning through this area at the end of the quest he was still doing it!). Now the new Radiant AI system means civillians will have realistic lives, going about chores and work like a real human, and enemies will make intelligent tactical choices. Yum.
4) The stats/level-up/class/perks mechanic: Remember at the start of Oblivion (and nearly every other RPG in existence) when you chose a character class only to play for 5 hours and decide it was maybe not the best idea to play as a weird barbarian-thief-healer and have to start again? Well Skyrim's done away with that shit. Instead of choosing a class, you decide as you play what kinda character you want to be. Want to be a battle mage? Fine, just act like a battle mage. Decided you'd rather be an archer? Use your bow and you're an archer! Sounds pretty awesome. Stats, as usual, increase as you use them but the interesting part is that as you level them up you unlock perks for that skill! Not character perks but skill-specific ones. This creates so many strategy options. Will you try and be a good all-rounder but gain perks slowly or will you focus on a small skillset and become a highly specialised adventurer, risking some game options being closed to you. Things like this increase replay value, the sign of a truly great game.
3) The Menu system and user interface: Oblivion had usable menus and there was nothing *awful* about them but staring at an alphabetised list of weapons on, essentially, a sepia toned spreadsheet was a little uninspiring. Skyrim has totally overhauled the menu system, taking cues from apple's, admittedly, impressive iTunes interface. The player brings up the menu with B (or circle on PS3) and a four pointed compass appears with an option for each direction: The Inventory, which is neater and renders each item in full 3D to be fully appreciated at leisure, Magic and Spells, which comes with a breakdown of how each spell works, the Skills option which makes the the player gaze to the stars where each skill is represented as a constellation that also functions as a perk tree and finally the Map which is so beautiful it hurts with the camera pulling up and revealing a world fully rendered in 3D as a map. All this shows just what an immersive experience Bethesda are crafting.
2) Combat, enemies and assignment of weapons/spells: Combat in previous elder scrolls titles was pretty tedious... Hack, shield, hack shield, ransack corpse, done. In Skyrim, combat has been beefed up with the general feel seeming to suggest more urgency and more realism. Each hit seems to really feel like it connects. Plus the player gets special killing moves which cut to a 3rd person view as your character dispatches foes with Batman-like finesse, just like the awesome VATS system in Fallout. Plus there's the GENIUS ability to assign a spell or weapon in each hand, left trigger for left hand, right trigger for right hand, allowing for dual weilding and weapon/spell combos as well as standard sword and shield style setups. Plus you can combine spell effects or assign the same spell to both hands for extra power. Another final dimension for combat is the addition of dragon shouts. These act like beefed-up spells, doing things such as stopping time, calling on a lightning storm to blast foes or drowning enemies in dragon fire. Shouts are learned by learning words in the dragon language then using the souls of slain dragons to unlock the word's power. Which brings me onto the dragons! As well as enemies like giants and Draugr (inspired by the Draugr zombies of norse myth in real life) we face off against these staples of the fantasy genre (pretty much the main premise of the game tbh!) and killing them means absorbing the aforementioned souls. Dragon encounters are random and unscripted so beware!
1) The Graphics: Well I had to mention 'em! I know gameplay is more important but I've literally never seen anything in games as beautiful as this game. The sparse, Nordic landscapes are full of forbidding, stark beauty and the lighting and water effects are unbelievable. Character movement looks fluid and realistic while faces look like FACES and not horse arses like in Oblivion. Truly it's gorgeous.
Well hope you enjoyed reding my feelings towards this game. And honestly, don't expect to hear from me after 11.11.11...
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