Just as I did with Gears of War 3 back in September, I’m going to give a brief summary of my experiences with The Elder Scrolls series, developed by Bethesda Softworks.
Back in the 7th grade, my friend told me about a game called The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I had no idea what it was and when he showed me the game; it really just confused me. There were lizards and cats walking around and bugs that my friend said were the transportation for the world. He pitched it to me as one of the best games of all time. I was unconvinced. Not that it was a bad game, I was just very unfamiliar with role-playing games and Morrowind was not doing me any favors. So I stuck with my Halo’s and Star Wars: Battlefront because it was familiar to me and I had a grasp on the rules of the world
Fast forward to 2006 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is released. Once again, my friend was telling me how amazing it was. I just didn’t see it. But I was looking from the outside in; perhaps I needed to play it. So I went out and bought Oblivion and it just didn’t click for me. Maybe it was the gameplay mechanics that I did not understand. Maybe it was the ridiculous amount of time that it took for you to actually have cool powers like my friend had. It was very strange for me to think that people had spent up to 150 hours playing one game. I just wasn’t that committed to a video game. I sold it during my freshman year of college to help pay for another friend’s PlayStation 2 he was trying to buy.
Fallout 3, from the same developers as The Elder Scrolls franchise, was released in 2008 and it caught my eye. The setting of a post-apocalyptic Washington D.C., to someone who lived so close to it, hit closer to home. I didn’t buy it initially because I had some feelings left over from Oblivion. So I rented it and tried a little harder to understand the game mechanics. It was a blast to play. I restarted my character a couple of times to finally find a character class that I actually liked. I bought the Game of the Year Edition of Fallout 3, a year later, and sunk about 80 hours into Fallout 3 and it became one of my favorite games of this generation.
Then at the 2010 Video Game Awards, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was announced and a release date of Nov. 11, 2011 was set in stone. I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for dragons since Spyro the Dragon on the PlayStation 1 so when I heard that dragons were returning as full-fledged creatures and not as final boss fights, it colored me impressed. Bethesda also said that they were doing a massive overhaul to the game’s engine and leveling systems, which were two of the big problems I had with Bethesda’s previous efforts. Well, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been released and I have played several hours of it.
Tune in next week for my final review of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
