On November 11, many of the men (and probably some of the women) at EHS raced to the store, picked up a game, then descended into their basements, never to be heard from again. The game? “Skyrim,” the fifth installation of the Elder Scrolls series from Bethesda Softworks. Like each of the other games in the main series, the game features non-linear gameplay and an expansive world for the player to explore, but does away with the class system in the previous games. This allows the player to choose their style of gameplay after getting used to the game (especially useful after realizing that a thief is going to have a harder time killing a dragon than a warrior or a mage).
Oh, right. I forgot to mention the dragons. There are DRAGONS in “Skyrim.” And not just as final bosses every once in awhile – they appear randomly as you travel throughout Skyrim. This randomness adds an extra dimension to the realism of the game, particularly evident when a dragon appears while the you’re strolling through an otherwise peaceful town and you have to fight it while the townspeople act as dragon-bait.
As far as the storyline of the main quest goes, it’s fairly predictable: You’re “the chosen one” – the Dragonborn – and you set out on a quest to save the land of Skyrim from the dragons that have just returned. After hours of killing anything that gets between you and a quest objective, you find out that the dragon god, Alduin, was not actually defeated the last time dragons were driven out of Skyrim (well that’s just awkward). You end up traveling to Sovngard, the in-game equivalent of the Norse Valhalla, and, after teaming up with the guy who didn’t actually kill Alduin the first time, killing Alduin for real. Once you’ve killed Alduin, you can keep exploring the world and doing any of (literally) hundreds sidequests, which range in complexity from mining ore for a lazy miner to fighting in the Skyrim Civil War.
Junior Sean Satterthwaite is one of many students who loves “Skyrim”, saying “’Skyrim’ is a great game because it has finally fulfilled my dream of slaying dragons in my free time.” His best moment in the game? “I was playing with a buddy [and] we’re 90% sure his horse killed a dragon.”
I’d have to agree with Mr. Satterthwaite, for the most part. The gameplay is highly engaging and the sprawling world and many questlines mean there’s always something to do, even if you want to ignore the main quest (I’m hardly into the main quest, but I’ve cleared around thirty dungeons and finished both the civil war and mage’s questlines).
The game isn’t perfect, however. One of its biggest flaws is the number of bugs present in the release. These range from innocuous glitches, like walls becoming transparent for no apparent reason; to strange occurrences, like a mammoth that I observed suddenly levitate, move a few hundred yards in the air, then return to the ground as if nothing had happened; to bugs that directly affect gameplay, such as a merchant who won’t sell to be me because I didn’t talk to him before finishing a particular quest or a door that would not let me through it until I had reloaded a save, traveled halfway across the world, and slept (in-game) for a day.
Given the immense scope of “Skyrim,” though, I can forgive most of these bugs due to the immense (and therefore incredibly complex) nature of the game. So what if something doesn’t render quite right or if a dragon decides to fly away from me (in reverse) for no particular reason? Bethesda could have taken a safer route and created a more linear, less buggy game, but “Skyrim” would have been much worse for it.
Interestingly, “Skyrim” has also given rise to several memes that have entered pop culture. The first to appear had to do with the first Dragon Shout you learn in the game, “Unrelenting Force.” When you use it, your player shouts “fus ro dah,” which then pushes everything out of your way. This featured prominently in several trailers, and a video of the trailer cutting to a FAILBlog video woman falling off a chair appeared in mid-September – well before the game was even released. That video has been followed by many others, including a popular parody of the “This is Sparta” scene in 300.
Another popular meme from the game comes from a line of dialogue often overheard in towns as you’re passing through, “I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow in the knee.” This soon spread to the real world, with “I used to” followed by just about anything and “until I took an arrow in the knee” becoming a popular saying. Indeed, when contracted for an interview about the game, Edina senior Waleed Minhas said “I was going to give you some quotes, then I took an arrow [in] the knee.”
My advice for anyone who doesn’t have “Skyrim”? Go buy it. And while you’re out, pick up enough soda and junk food for a month or so. You won’t be leaving your basement anytime soon.
