Bethesda made a bit of a stir last november in the lead-up to the release of Fallout 4 by casually mentioning that, to learn the ropes of developing on the Xbox One, the studio ported The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim to the console. The much-beloved 2011 RPG was going to be coming back, it seemed, and a rabid fanbase swelled with excitement! And, despite claims by Bethesda that it had no plans to actually *release* this port, it was announced at E3 2016 that, yes, Skyrim was totally coming back on Playstation 4 and Xbox One, along with an updated version for PC.
For those of you who haven't played the original, Skyrim is an open-world action RPG similar to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, or The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. Gameplay consists of running around the titular country of Skyrim, diving into dungeons and abandoned forts to slay the denizens within and find cool stuff. You swing swords, you cast spells, you sneak, you steal, the works! Leveling in the game is based on what you do; as you use skills, they will increase in efficacy. Increase them enough, and you'll level up, granting a skill point which you can use to unlock special abilities and perks for the skills you've leveled. Compared to how leveling worked in Oblivion, where you set which skills needed to be increased to level allowing players to only pick abilities they wouldn't use and steamroll the game, it's smart and a good way to make your character play to the skills you use.
The combat was never particularly complex; You can sneak up on enemies to get bonus damage, or cast spells on the ground that activate like traps, or use the occasional conveniently placed environmental object to give you an edge, but for the most part you just swing your weapon or throw your fireball and run away when the enemy gets close and starts swinging. But it's engaging enough to get you through hours and hours of dungeons, which look fairly samey after a while but never to the degree that they feel copy-pasted.
In Skyrim, you play as the Dragonborn, an adventurer of legend who can absorb the souls of dragons. It's good that you show up when you do, too, since Dragons have suddenly reappeared in the world after centuries of absence to destroy mankind (and elfkind, and catkind, and lizardkind; there's a wide variety in Skyrim) and take over the world! To combat the dragons, you use your aforementioned skills along with your "Thu'ums", or "Shouts", turning the language of the dragons against them and your other enemies in battle. These "Shouts" are effectively powerful spells on a cooldown that you earn by both learning the words, typically on a mural at the end of dungeons, and spending souls you collect after fighting Dragons to unlock them, with a variety of abilities such as a powerful knockback, fire breath, or pacifying your foe. While hardly ever necessary, the abilities are still cool to play with, and provide yet another incentive to journey through every location you stumble across.
The main story of the game is dealing with the Dragon menace, assisted by what's left of the organization known as The Blades (a much smaller organization after the events of the previous games). In addition, the game has a B-plot of sorts surrounding the civil war between the Imperial Legion, the rulers of the entire continent of Tamriel, and the Stormcloaks, 'true sons of Skyrim' who want it to be ruled independently rather than as part of the Empire. Players can choose to take a side in the conflict, helping the Imperials stomp out the Stormcloak resistance or assist the Stormcloaks in driving out the Imperials.
These stories, where you take on the dragon menace or decide which side of the civil war to fight on, are there if you want to do them, but I've dumped hundreds of hours into Skyrim and never gotten close to finishing either. This is mainly because of the massive amount of dungeons and sidequests to be found in the game, which can be ludicrously distracting from any set goal for yourself. You'll be running back to town to get to the business of dragon hunting when, oh dang, I don't think I've seen that dungeon before. Oh, there's a dude here with a cool mask! I gotta fight him and get it! Okay, now that's taken care of I can go and- whoa, dragon! Gotta fight it! Alright, finally time to- oh, a courier just gave me a letter telling me there's some daedric shit going on in a town on the other side of the map! Gotta check it out! So on and so forth for hours. There's a lot to do in the game, and it never feels boring even after all this time.
Speaking of the dragons, I feel the need to note that, for all the pomp and circumstance surrounding their inclusion and the amazing rush the first few fights are, eventually fighting them becomes boring. You see them in the horizon, you head in that direction, and once the dragon notices you it kind flies in a circle for a bit and breathes fire or ice at you. After a while it'll land, allowing you to get some swings in if you're not using a ranged weapon. Rinse, repeat, and there you go: dead dragon. For the huge variety of abilities you get as Dragonborn, and for as much as the game emphasizes that your "Shouts" are just what happens when Dragon gets spoken, you never see the interesting abilities being used by the dragons against you. In a game with so much stuff, it feels like a missed opportunity.
You'll notice that, so far, I'm speaking on the original 2011 Skyrim and not the newly-released 2016 Skyrim Special Edition. That is because besides the graphical improvements, it is the exact same game. There is very nice lighting! The draw distance is much improved! I've heard that the game has some behind-the-scenes changes that make it able to handle more stuff without crashing! But it is, in almost every sense of the word, a repainted version of the original Skyrim. There's no new content, unless you count the original game’s DLC, which I don't.
It's so much the exact same thing that one of the first things I did upon booting the game up was try one of my favorite speedrunning glitches: in the first indoor area of the game, you can pick up a bowl and use it to pass through a wall. The game doesn't handle collision with curved objects particularly well, so if you hold the bowl in front of your character the bowl will clip into the wall and your character will clip into the bowl, which sort of chains off itself and causes you to clip through the wall. I picked up a bowl off a table, pointed at the wall, and ran forward. And I instantly passed through. Mining will also only notify you of the first and last piece of ore being put into your inventory, with no notification of the third piece you get in between. I also put a bucket on an storekeepers head, which the game counted as obscuring the NPCs vision, and stole every loose item in their store by exploiting this glitch that I could have sworn they fixed already in the base game?
I cannot emphasize enough how much I've heard the game runs a bit smoother under the hood, but as far as I can tell none of the glitches or other weird issues in the game have been addressed.
Bethesda has decided that their graphical upgrade (many aspects of which still don't compare to downloading mods if you're a PC player by the way) and Skyrim’s existence on a new console is worth full price. Skyrim Special Edition, which does little to nothing besides add a fresh coat of paint, will cost you a whopping $60 to pick up and play at home. For almost the exact same game that was released 5 years ago.
I can't bring myself to recommend it. I was able to get the game for free; if you own the original Skyrim and all of its DLC on PC you get the Special Edition for free and I'm certainly not complaining about having another excuse to dive in, especially considering that the improved draw distance leads to some stunning vistas that I never noticed in the original game. But if I was expected to pay full price for the game again, I would balk, and rightfully so. Nicer textures and less fog do little to disguise the fact that it's just the same game again; even if you somehow don't already own the game, you can get a version that looks only marginally worse for significantly less money. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a fantastic and fun game that can provide hundreds of hours of dungeon delving fun, and I cannot recommend it enough. But in 2016, the value proposition that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition makes simply does not add up. Play Skyrim, if you haven't. But for now, until a price drop, you can safely skip its Special Edition.
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