A brilliant RPG that delivers everyting an RPG shouldl. Action Adventure, freeform exploration a great main story line.
Before writing this review I have played every guild I have completed every side quest I can find and have obviously completed the main quest.
First up Story
You do not need to know anything about the previous games to play this. All the elder scrolls games are stand alone. There are some references for the fans though.
You are in prison, why we don’t know, but it’s an elder scrolls convention. When all of a sudden the Emperor of Cyrodiil the country you are currently locked up in comes a little trip through your cell. Strange yes, but the reason is simple. There is a secret escape tunnel through your cell out of the city, and stupidly the guards screwed up and put you in this cell, which is always supposed to be left empty. Why is the king escaping, well a strange group calling themselves the Mythic Dawn are out to kill him, they have already killed all his sons and heirs and its his turn. In his escape you to can escape but the emperor sees something in you, recognising you from a dream and charges you with the fate of all cyrodiil. No pressure.
The resulting acts of the Mythic Dawn mean that the gates to oblivion (HELL) are opening and Deadra (demons) are wandering the land.
The fate of the world is now in your hands, all you have is the king’s amulet and the name of a monk you should talk to......the rest is up to you.
Each guild in the game have their own little story and objectives to achieve. The mages are sick of necromancers, the fighters guild are worried about new competition in town. The thieves want to get the law of their backs and pull the ultimate heist, the assassins.....well they just want to kill people.
Other people in small towns need your help to, peoples husbands are murdered, sirens are luring men back to their cottage for......um... you know....then robbing them blind, Counts are missing countesses are missing paintings (these countesses loose stuff easily huh) cities are under siege, farms are over run with goblins, twins are separated at birth......the list goes on the possibilities are endless.
Gameplay
The learning curve is quite good in this game. The very beginning level is a tutorial, but it is a disguised tutorial. The opening level has you searching a dungeon learning the story of the game and gradually learning all the basic controls and tricks. Cunningly you also get to try out most of the different weapons and play types (stealth/ gung ho killing) so you get a feel for what style of play you like, and what sort of character you’d like to create. This is the cunning part for an RPG, you do all this before you choose your strengths and weaknesses. So you can then pick your personal preference or the game can offer you suggestions based on what it saw you do. Clever huh?
Ok so you emerge from the tutorial you know what you want to be. What do you do now? Well here’s where the elder scrolls games come into their own. You do whatever you want.
You can go find the person you’ve been suggested to find, or go a wander round the shops of the nig city, wander the country side and go pick flowers (for hippies or alchemists) or search the various ruins and forts that are spread across the land.
Although this may sound overwhelming its not. If you have a mission to do just select it in your journal and you have a quest marker to point you in the right direction.
There are several ways to get missions.
1) Join a guild or faction. Some you find others find you based on your actions.
2) Hear someone talking on the street, or in pubs. Everyone has a story to tell
3) Ask people what’s going on
The open ended nature of the game means you can do what you want. You can spend days never doing a mission at all just exploring the country, and there’s a lot of it, you can even ignore the main quest completely.
The unique thing here for an open ended game, is it has a ferocious pace. When you are on a mission you can feel a sense of urgency to push forward. And often missions leave things open for a continuation in the next mission and you find once you start you are compelled to go on. The game draws you in.
As for leveling up, there is no pesky experience point system. If you use a skill, you get better at it. It feels very natural. If you want to skip some levels and you have money pay some one to train you.
Though the skills have been simplified since Morrowind. For Example Long blade and short Blade ar now just the one skill of Blade. You now only get Heavy and light armour skills. Medium and Un-armoured are gone. THis simplifies the game and allows you to focus more on gameplay, but i have to admit, I miss some of the skills.
Graphics
Unless you've been living under a rock, you’ve probably seen screen shots or heard people babble on about the graphics of this game.
The landscapes are pretty, but there is room for improvement. Often in the distance textures are blurry and the water has additional textures that make it opaque and murky. Luckily as TES have always had a strong mod community and Bethseda provide the tools. There are many mods to fix this all freely available. SO Cyrodiil can look as beautiful as you hoped it would. Close up there is no complaints many of the textures are beautifully rendered.
Lighting offers HDR or bloom lighting so the can look superb.
People however don’t look just as impressive. Often they look pretty ugly and it gets hard to define between some of the races. Its now virtually impossible to tell a bosmer female from an altmer female for example (two different types of elf for those who’ve never played an Elder scrolls game before) but yet again the mod community is stepping up to this challenge and making it better.
Overall the graphics are good, epic at times, but they could have been better, they are just not quite perfect.
Sound
The score of this game is a strong point. The powerful orchestral music’s, quite dramatic timpani’s, trumpet blasting triumphant music all add to the ambiance of the game. You wont walk away humming any of these tunes, except maybe the main theme, but subconsciously they are there controlling how you perceive the world and your situations.
The voice acting is also good, however there seems to be only a few voice actors for all the thousands of NPC's . This spoils the illusion slightly. But the dialogue is sharp and at times quite witty. Often the occasional of the cuff remarks a character can make, had me in hysterics. Some famous voices also appear in the cast most notably Patrick Stewart in a brief role, and Sean Bean as on of the pivotal characters of the main quest.
Throughout the game NPC have conversations, sometimes these are quite amusing, but often the sound very strained, as the AI makes up the conversation as it goes along. Sometimes with hilarious consequences.
During one mission I had to help a man fake his death then later sneak him out of the city. On the way out, he stops to talk to a local. The start asking how each other are and chat like old friends, while I get impatient. Well then the conversation comes around to the topic of his death. The woman asks him if he believes it was true he was murdered, to which he replies "I couldn't honestly say".
Also the mud crab conversations will drive you nuts, instead of the weather all the people of cyrodiil talk about is mud crabs.
Value
This is a game you can play for 100+ hours, and with the modding community it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I'd say that’s value.
Plus Points
Good Story
Good music
Good graphics
Horses
Negative points
Graphics not what they could have been
Dungeons can look similar and feel repetitive at times
Will consume your life