The past couple of days I have been randomly obsessed with Skyrim. I know many of you have been swept up in to the same disease blight blessing which is the lovely Bethesda love child that lets you pretty much live a second life in the world of a medieval thief/mage or warrior. However, now that the honeymoon phase is over, I thought I would write a quick article about the things that I so far have LOVED and the things that I really don’t. Now while this list isn’t EVERYTHING, it’s just some random thoughts I wanted to write out.

Questing aka GO HERE FIRST!

In the beginning of Skyrim, I felt like there was some serious POWER behind the storyline. I mean, huge dragons, lots of explosions, and some good dialog that really helped setup the character you were about the create.

We need more Michael Bay!

Now, as someone who has done a lot of side quests in the game waiting to do the main storyline, I feel like some of the quests if not a lot of them don’t have the same BANG for it’s buck. They usually result in the following:

1. Hey! This <insert area> is being overran by <insert monster>, feel free to clear the area or run off and pilfer a village. We don’t really care.
2. Go retrieve <insert item> from the very bowels of <insert haunted/cursed/overran area> all the way on the opposite side of the map! Why can’t the NPC go and do it?! Heck if I know.
3. An NPC needs a random item you may or may not have. You might acquire it through questing, killing something or randomly get in to a dungeon that has it. Who knows.. But you better keep every damn item you can in case an NPC needs it later on.

Now before you go on and say “Matt, not every quest is like that!”, I will agree, it’s not every quest but a lot of them do follow this outline. While I would LOVE to do all these things if they mixed in the same Michael Bay over the top explosions and mayhem that they do in the beginning of the game, sadly they don’t. Most of the side quests don’t have much bang to them and it feels like sometimes these quests are just being written by a bunch of lazy NPC’s that have nothing better to do then send you to <insert location here randomly on your map>. I’m hoping that the more I get in to the main storyline/quests, the more action starts to kick off.

Interface aka FINGER CRAMPING OF DEATH

My A.D.D. thanks you.

I can’t speak for the consoles, but on PC, I find the interface GUI to be beautiful. Lot’s of little animations and things getting my A.D.D. attention. Bethesda really did a fantastic job making the interface look really good. As my brother pointed out, whatever perk system you pick out will show up at night in the constellation of stars. I myself didn’t even notice this.

However, with that, I will say that on PC the control scheme of working your way around the interface is pretty bad. I can definately tell they really designed it with consoles in mind. For instance, in order to hotkey a weapon to the numbers 1-8 you must first:

1. Hit tab.
2. Then click over to your spell/item/weapon and press F.
3. Upon pressing F, you need to hit tab twice.
4. Then press Q, then wield said weapon and then hit 1-8.
5. However, if you get a second weapon of the same type, it dumps your hotkey, and don’t get me started with hotkeying a weapon and spell.

As I said, it’s bad, and that’s just with hotkeys. I have read that it’s better on consoles, but as I don’t play it on a controller, I can’t really say. Why not just let people HOTKEY the the weapon in the main interface without having to favorite it, then pull it up with Q, then all the other crap. It would be nice to assign hotkeys to my mouse buttons too. I mean, I only have like eight buttons attached to it, why even use 1-8. This is 2011, 1-8 should only be an option if we time traveled back to the year 2001.

Wait, what am I saying. Even games back in the late 90′s allowed you to hotkey different functions to your mouse button if you really wanted to. What the heck?!

Dialog aka I’m too lazy to read the quest dialog!

I'm a married man.. Stop looking at me like that.

Oh, I love me some good dialog. I LOVE that new MMO’s and RPG’s are being read to us instead of having to do the reading. I mean lets be honest, in an RPG, there are A LOT of lines of reading to do in order to really appreciate the game. Sometimes though, I don’t want to read. I want the NPC to talk to me as I might be feeling a bit lazy today.

Skyrim does an excellent job of really nailing the voice acting when it comes to quests. Of course you’ll be hearing the same voice actors, but that’s expected in a game as large as this. Not every quest can be read by a different voice, but Skyrim does a great job at not just using the same actor over and over on a string of quests. I am very impressed by the amount of emotion and acting that each of the quest NPC’s have, whether its a stern hate in the voice of a thief or a really over the top demon, it works really well.

I’ve read reviews so far of people knocking Bethesda on how some of the NPC’s will say the same thing over and over when you walk by them. I understand their point of view, however, you really can’t program 25 million lines of code per NPC. Well, I mean you could but can you imagine the amount of money it would cost in voice acting alone just for someone cutting a block of wood?I can get over this small little defect as I understand not everything can be original and witty.

Wrap Up

Overall, I love this game. While I could go on and on about the things I love and like, I really don’t feel like writing another 1000 words on the subject. You can check out IGN’s article on the things they loved and hated at “What Skyrim Does and Doesn’t Fix About Oblivion“, which is the reason why I wrote this to begin with honestly. Play the game and let me know what you think so far of your experience, and we can compare notes as my thief comes and STABS YOU IN THE BACK!