Why The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is like a healthy mountain hike
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011)
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011)
It’s been a patch of sunny weather recently, and you know what that means, don’t you? Yes, it’s time for us gamers to make that ultimate decision - will we go out and embrace the sun, the Vitamin D, the outdoors life? Or will we batten down the hatches and barricade ourselves inside, consuming video games through hour after interminable hour of sunshine until you’ve clocked up another 12 hours in the latest game, and it’s another day wasted?
Wish I could do the latter, mate, but unfortunately my presence is often requested, so out of the house I go. But I’ll be honest, although I’m more of a winter boy, in summer months you get barbecues, outdoor dining, folks wearing less and afternoon drinking, and you just can’t beat it. A bit of a problem though - what do you do on the hungover Sunday after?
Well, if you’ve got an Instagram or a TikTok, apparently the answer is that you go hiking. Now, I think you and I are normal, and we wouldn’t normally regard getting up early and going up a hill to be particularly fun. And on a bloody Sunday, no less. But it seems this curious hiking phenomenon has only grown more and more popular in recent years, so we’d better check it out.
Worse than that, I’ve actually been told, to my pale face, that we have reason to be proud of Ireland. I thought it might be because of our much vaunted drinking culture, but no, we’re meant to take pride in the fact that we have some of the greenest, nicest hills and mountains around, not to mention some of the freshest air in the world.
Fresh air? Well, naturally, us mouthbreathers are only consuming home air in our bedrooms - that fresh stuff is for the outdoors types, and I wouldn't have thought there were too many of them in Ireland.
But lo and behold, one day I got on my sneakers and up a hill I went, to see what it was all about. I made sure it was a nice easy one of course, and at a reasonable hour and slow pace as well, I’m not Superman. Turned out there were quite a lot of radiant folks dandering about, enjoying life. Could it be that I, the ever-fashionable Burkey, have missed a new craze?
Well, obviously not, because humans have been walking up hills for a lark since, oh, I don’t know, the medieval times. It’s definitely what you spend half of your life doing in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim anyway, although as I recall, most people who bought this game on release were of the barricade-and-stay-inside variety.
Yes, when this game hit shelves a long time ago now, in November 2011, a lot of people became deranged. They dedicated a hundred hours to this game in the space of a long weekend, somehow. Unfortunately no-one told them that the sixth Elder Scrolls game would take longer to release than… the time it would take for yours truly to get up Everest, I suppose.
Truth be told, I would have just written Skyrim off as a depressing, grey and brown game and had done with it. Neither of us would have had the time. To illustrate my point, an old manager I worked with once proudly brought his Skyrim strategy guide into work, and it was a behemoth of over a thousand pages. Do you really want that?
I know that sounds a bit juicy, but I’m more about games that can be explained in 32 pages, or better, in a short WhatsApp text, or the back of a cigarette packet. I’ve got no interest in the Lusty Argonian Maid (I mean it) or the Virgin Claws of Westpherae and all of the other lore that pervades a game like this. But gamers seemed to eat Skyrim up, so why not have a go?
And I’ll say this, the game is more fun than I thought, although actually a lot simpler than I realised as well. In fact, there isn’t even much fanciness programmed into the menus and healthbars and other GUI elements at all, it’s all very perfunctory.
The combat is simpler than I thought as well, just run up to enemies and mash the button and you’ll probably win. Of course, you should ignore all potions you may have, all books and lore items you may have picked up, and you’ll have to resist the temptation not to pick up every little thing and talk to every little orc, or you will be immediately overwhelmed and you won’t get anywhere - I reckon this is the big mistake people many people make with Skyrim.
Mind you, you’ll have a job even doing any of that, because you just get accosted by enemies all the time in this game. And I don’t just mean when you’re down in the legitimately creepy dungeons: you’ll be walking along a nice mountain path, when suddenly there’s a bear on you. I thought it was bad enough being up there in the real trails and getting assaulted by bugs all the time, but Skyrim doesn’t give you many chances to breathe at all.
You’ll probably eventually get quite fed up with the amount of dragons that spawn in your vicinity and harass the hell out of you as well, blowing away villages and killing important NPCs if you let them. They’ll come after you until you finish the main story, which statistically not very many people do.
You’ll even run into massive spiders out there in the world, which was a bit much for me - normally, the spiders in Skyrim would be just a tad too big for me to even consider playing the game, but for you dear reader, I can make that sacrifice. Although I must say, in a callous move by the developers, the introduction sequence where you’re escaping a dragon puts you in a mandatory fight against a couple of the big hairy fellows. Thanks ever so much for that, guys.
And just when you’ve dealt with them, or perhaps installed one of the game’s many mods that turns those spiders into T-posing bears, then along come the robospiders that’ll almost always jumpscare you. Incidentally I would rather chew my own face off than play this game in VR, so for those of you who have the cojones to play that way, I commend you.
You will definitely have to play on newer hardware though, because I must mention that this game, on its original hardware of PS3, Xbox 360 and to some extent PC, was just a glitchy, buggy mess on release.
And don’t get me wrong, glitches are fine. Especially when you’re gaining glitchy purchase up the mountainsides by jumping at them at strange angles - would that I could do that in real life without getting tired. But when the game freezes all the time and save-files literally become too cumbersome and bulky to ever load up again, that’s not on.
Yes, yes, I know the game has been re-released about fifty times and the obvious wisdom is to play it on new hardware, but this isn’t something I can let slide. After all, what if you and I were trekking up a mountain together, relying on each other for support, and then suddenly I just went limp and refused to respond anymore? You’d be a bit cheesed off with me, wouldn’t you? You should probably just ride my carcass down the side of the mountain and go home, at that point. It’s what the Dragonborn would do.
25 July 2023