Thane of Whiterun

Oh the joys of playing RPGs. And what better game than Skyrim to experience it?

In my opinion actually, there are a lot of other RPGs that must be better because in my opinion Syrim rarely does offer a great moments when it comes to combat. And that is very important for a hack-and-slash type game fan like me.

If you don't know about Skyrim, you probably use internet only to check your emails, because the last few months, many a website have been plagued by the attack of the Skyrim memes, mainly "arrow to the knee". I'm not gonna explain what arrow to the knee means or even what a meme is. If you're that interested, Google is your friend.

But I will tell you what the game is about. Its about a guy/girl (all RPGs give you the option of building up your character from scratch, including gender, appearance, powers etc., hence your character can be either guy or a girl) who appears out of nowhere in the middle of nowhere and ends up becoming the man/woman who determines the fate of the fair city of Skyrim when a dragon comes out of nowhere and you kill it and absorb its power, revealing that you are the fabled Dragonborn (and you possibly just killed your mom or dad and absorbed its power).

Skyrim was released last year and it has won several awards including game of the year award from several review websites. Which is all the more reason for you to try it out, and also my main motivation to give it a try as well.

I tried playing but gave up the first two times because in the first time, it just didn't make sense. It shoves too much information at your face. There are no tutorials and you are left to figure out everything by yourself (there's a help section which is as big as Wikipedia which makes it not-so-much-of-a-help section). If you are new to RPGs, you're gonna get annoyed often as you don't know how to manage your inventory, you don't know which items are going to be useful and which aren't, which powers/weapons are gonna be useful etc. The second time I gave it up because it was just too boring. Until you own a horse, you gotta get everywhere by foot and you'll spend as much time in the game travelling as you would if you travel the same distance in real life. Realism at that depth is just...boring.

Also when you wanna get new weapons and you don't have any serious dough on you, you gotta collect some metal ingots, get to a weaponsmith and YOU FORGE YOUR OWN WEAPONS. Like you gotta get some leather pelts by killing some wolves, cure it to make leather strips, buy/steal some metal ingots and you literally forge it. And then you can improve it with your "fine smithing" skills. This is one of the reasons I finished Mass Effect 3 first (its ending sucked by the way) before getting to Skyrim. 

About a week ago, I gave Skyrim one last shot, and this time I finally figured it out...and I still don't like this game. Travelling is boring, though you regularly come across wolves and trolls and giants and mammoths who try to keep it lively. You can either sneak past them or you can just kill them with your might. Its not easy as it sounds because you giants can hit you so hard you literally end up flying in the sky. Mammoths are sturdy and they'll trample you to death. Managing your inventory is annoying as you can carry only upto a specified weight and you come across so many items that you can't make up your mind about what you wanna take and what you wanna leave.

And the fighting system - pardon my french but its a clusterf**k. It is clever and stupid at the same time. It allows you to dual weild, and there are many varieties of weapons. You can battle with magic too. But the problem is, you gotta figure it out all by yourself. The level up system is not straightforward - it has too many options and confuses you with percentages and numbers. There is no tutorial for fighting or using magic, and you gotta go to a college to train in magic. No, literally. There is an actual in-game college of magic where you go to learn magic skills. 

B*tch please, I already have and engineering degree and I will get another one in a couple of months.

Your character is pretty dumb while fighting. You end up swinging your weapons at the same direction even when your traget has moved away. There are better fighting systems the latest games like in the Assassin's Creed series which makes this one look like its a game from the 90s. You don't know that you can use magic until you figure it out yourself. Switching weapons is slow and dragons turn you into grilled chicken before you switch your weapon to block its fire breath.

So what is good about Skyrim then? Everything else. The evironment is detailed, looks great and rich with minute details. Non-playable characters are intelligent and there are rarely and bugs with enemy AI. The story is also pretty good, and there are plenty of side-missions to keep the completionist in you pretty busy. To complete every mission in the game it should take you a several months atleast. 

 So, yes, I am going to continue playing this game, to see how the story plays out. And maybe, just maybe, when I finish it, I will make an arrow to the knee joke.

Fus Ro Dah!