I was fortunate enough today to sit in on a behind-closed-doors demo of the newest title in The Elder Scrolls series, subtitled Skyrim. As many of you probably already know (all both of you podcast listeners), I sank over one hundred hours of gameplay into Oblivion, and yet still only managed to complete about a third of the game due to my exploration gene. After seeing Skyrim today, I can only imagine it will be equally engulfing.
The game is literally enormous, sporting a massive overworld (naturally) and over 150 dungeons. The towns are incredibly detailed, some are very large, and the townspeople even have their own jobs and go about their lives while you roam about their general vicinity. It’s closer to a medieval reality than ever before, and that alone is truly impressive.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Everything from the creation engine to a new renderer, to the scripting language, interface, and even the animation system have been overhauled. Texture work has obviously been modernized, which was to be expected. In short, it all looks quite beautiful indeed, and truly lifelike at times—three years of development well put to use.
The demo (played by a Bethesda employee) opened with the hero in the mountains. As the elevation increased, lush green landscapes transitioned seamlessly to cold, snowy hills. A fox roamed the roads we were exploring, and wooly mammoths later lurched toward a town in the distance (not all creatures are immediately hostile). Fish leapt out of the waters in an attempt to swim upstream. The weather changes dynamically with the elevation, area, and general environment. At one point, it was snowing pretty heavily. A mountain in the distance, apparently the world’s largest peak, featured a ring of rolling fog surrounding its perimeter.
The game’s music is also, once again, perfect for the mood. Industry veteran Jeremy Soule is once again heading up the soundtrack creation, and the stuff I heard from Skyrim very closely resembles that of Oblivion. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a great thing.
There’s no shortage of evident improvements however when taking in the world of Skyrim. For starters, the interface has been livened up with a logical four-way directional selection menu that provides easy access to magic, items, skills, and the map. You will find a quick select menu for your equipment, and you can place anything in your favorites and then quickly recall the command from the menu. Each in-game item is also now rendered in full 3-D, with a meticulous attention to detail—even the foods look ludicrously realistic. And you want to talk ludicrous? How about over 300 books in the game, all fully 3-D and readable (if you like). You can also pick up mysterious notes which provide clues to other parts of the game.
While we’re on the subject of graphics and detail, kill cams have been added to make the combat more exciting. Now, the finishing blow is often displayed more dramatically to help capture the feel of the battle with more ferocity. The game is also considerably more graphic than Oblivion, so whether or not you appreciate that sort of thing, expect it.
Later, we witnessed some gameplay through one of the game’s 150 dungeons (that number bears repeating). This particular one featured a terrible foe called the Giant Frostbite Spider as a sort of boss monster, and as our hero battled it, a victim entwined in silk yelled at him from the shadows, begging for him to kill it (and by the way—the lighting effects are freaking gorgeous!). Once the beast was dead and the victim had been freed, he ran toward the treasure, laughing about the foolishness of the idea of sharing it with the hero, in spite of his extremely kind deed. Thus, the man was quickly thereafter met with the tip of a sword—he got what was coming to him.
We also saw some battles with a couple of different dragons. They’re fearsome beasts for sure—producing huge low-frequency thumps when they land, and breathing fire and whatnot all over the place. Dragons will swoop in and engage (read: destroy) various NPCs, showcasing their might and just generally being jerks. If you’ve any hope of defeating one, you’ll surely need a full understanding of your various abilities; in the demo to which we were treated, the hero used a shout to call a thunderstorm into play to help with the battle.
There are somewhat more involved puzzles at play this time as well, such as a door we witnessed in the demo which required the hero to line up three symbols and then place a golden claw relic in the center once that was finished to open it. Apparently this information can be derived via a quick reading of a journal which was picked up earlier in the quest, too, so it isn’t like you’re completely SOL if you just can’t figure something out. On the same subject, there is a spell—Clairvoyance—which will also reveal to you a breadcrumb path for a few precious seconds if you lose your way as well.
Tons of other details have, of course, already been discussed elsewhere. The game’s new system of so-called Dragon Shouts allows players to collect words to assemble (three apiece) into powerful spell-like attacks and environmental modifications. A skill tree consists of not only progressions between skills, but also progressions within skills. And you can dual-wield any two one-handed weapons—another cool varying factor that makes for some sick combat options.
Overall, the game left me salivating for more, perhaps slightly concerned for the future of my marriage. It’s a huge world, it’s beautiful, and most importantly, it looks just like you’d expect the next evolution of an Elder Scrolls title to look. This November, you can count us in on Bethesda’s next blockbuster.