The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – better than Oblivion in every way

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is an amazing game, one that people have sunk literally hundreds of hours into, but it’s far from perfect. The producers of the followup The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim know this, and upon first look it’s immediately obvious how improved the game looks already.

Do you remember that moment in the beginning of Oblivion where you stumbled out of the prison and saw daylight for the first time, looking around at the landscape and seeing for miles around? Remember how stunning it was when you realized that everything you could see you could explore? That if you threw a fireball it would travel and travel till it hit a mountain far off in the distance with a puff of fire?

It has nothing on Skyrim.

We recently sat in on a demo in NYC and as it began we were stunned by how much more beautiful the world was. It simply looks more organic and real, full of trees and other greenery along the dirt path the character was walking. Snowy peaks dot the mountains towering up into the sky. Clouds drifted overhead while snow fell in the distance, giving an example of the improved weather effects.  

A quick switch to the third person perspective nearly made the gathered journalist emit whoops of glee- the formerly stilted animation of previous games has been completely revamped. Before it was nearly impossible to play the game from the perspective but now your character moves smoothly and can transition fluidly from a walk to a run. This may not sound like anything too impressive since it’s a standard feature in most games but Oblivion was unplayable in this perspective. In Skyrim even the camera will adjust to better fit the gameplay, zooming out when you draw a weapon in anticipation of combat, for example. There’s also finally a run button, mapped to the LB button the Xbox build we watched.

Another huge improvement is the inventory system, which has been much streamlined. Now when you go into the menu you can click on items to favorite them which will enable you to quickly select whatever you’d like to wield- swords, shields, spells, torches, etc- dozens of objects if you choose. During gameplay you simply hit up or down on the d-pad and the game will pause and allow you to quickly scroll through a list that pops up, and you simply hit the left or right trigger to instantly pick it up with that hand.

Oh, that’s right. Now you can duel wield. Anything can be held in combination with anything else, and while the old sword and shield combo still works great you may want to hold two fireball spells, for instance, which will amplify the effects of the spell. Every item has been rendered in 3D in your inventory menu so you can see just everything looks before you equip it, and some story objects even encourage your close observation, as clues may be found…

After showing how much better everything looked the producer showed off the new improved 3D map (which will show locations you’ve already been to and allow you to fast travel) and walked through a heavily forested area, finally coming upon a cave that was full of raiders. Demonstrating how easy it was to switch weapons on the fly, he shot off arrows from a crouched, stealthy position, battled enemies with a blade in each hand, and even burnt them to  a crisp with his spells. Here he demonstrated a new ability you’ll gain in Skyrim- Shouts. Along your journeys you’ll learn various words that can be combined into “shouts”. 

Think of it as a barbarian war cry, a bellowed command that could instill fear in your foes. You can power yourself up in all sorts of ways using shouts, even by manipulating the world around you and even summoning your very own dragon to fight by your side later on in the game. In the Elder Scrolls lore it’s the Nords that used these battle cries, as well as the Dragons that roamed the countryside. You learn words by deciphering dragon script you scrawled on walls around the world and then by eventually killing dragons and taking their souls, which certainly won’t be an easy task, as we were soon to find out.

Descending down a trail to grassy green plains, our hero came across a giant leading a herd of mammoths, what counts for the giant’s cattle. This was an example of the neutral characters you’ll run across in the game- now, not every creature wants to kill you. But they will fight back, as we were shown. The warrior started hacking at the giant and not really doing any damage to it, and we were getting a bit worried for our guy as the giant swung a club his way- until a massive dragon came swooping out of the sky, grabbed the giant, flew a hundred feet into the air and then let him go.

What. The. Hell.

While this event was scripted for the demo, we were assured that dragon attacks are quite random in the world. Sometimes they’ll even raze towns.

As the dragon swooped to attack we were shown the power of one of the Shouts, as the character bellowed a command that caused a lightning storm to immediately start-up. The longer you hold down the button, the stronger the shout was, and this one was held to the max. The effect was stunning- the world turned almost black and lighting streaked out of the sky, actually hitting the dragon, who nose-dived and crashed into the field. He ran over and chopped and chopped away at him as the dragon tried shouts of his own and to set him on fire, but the warrior was too strong for him. (Actually, he had invincibility on, and assured us that killing a dragon would be one of the hardest things in the game.)

The dragon died and burned to a crisp, leaving behind a soul that the warrior captured. Here we were shown how you can use this to learn new phrases for the shouts.

That was the end of our demo. It’s obvious that Bethesda has listened to gamers and improved things, and we’re not even talking about the massive amount of quests you’ll find along the way. The producer chuckled when asked how much gameplay you’d get out of this. “100 hours? 200 hours? 300 hours? You can keep playing forever.”

We hope to.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim hits stores 11.11.11.