So Skyrim arrived in the post yesterday. I was holding off on buying it until after christmas because, you know, money, but for some reason for about 3 days only every game store in the UK decided to slash the game's prices and sell it for a mere £20. So i was all over that stuff. The only assumption i can make is that digital distribution meant that all the physical copies werent being bought, and the stores wanted to clear stock before christmas or something.

Anyway, i booted it up and made me a Kahjiit character. Right from the get go, i have to say how amazed i am with the various races. Seeing as Oblivion, the last Elder Scrolls game, basically told you to choose between about 5 varieties of humans and a few humans with pointy faces they really did an awesome job on making every race different from the others, even just the various types of humans. The amount of customisation you can get even within the same race is awesome, too, and you can do it all without having to resort to the mass of sliders most RPG's resort to.

My Kahjiit is super skinny, has those big tufty ears like a lynx, a big ole scar across his face and very dirty fur. Stereotypical adventurer is stereotypical! A couple of adventurers later and i'm loving the game so far. I was actually pretty dubious about Skyrim.. yeah, Oblivion was fun but it did seem to be "going through the motions" to a point, and the last two Bethesda games - the two latest Fallout games - really didnt get me going. Fallout 3 featured a very bleak wasteland, but not one i particularly liked. The people were shiftless and annoying, pointlessly agressive and mistrusting at best and irrational dicks at worst. It just wasnt a world i wanted to defend or explore. New Vegas was slightly better for that, but was such a bug riddled nightmare that i never bothered picking up a copy myself.

Now, Skyrim has it's fair share of bugs, true - i was about 20 minuites in before i encountered the epic rave cow trying to clip trough a fence before shooting into the sky, perhaps to go save their home planet, but those are the only serious bugs i've found so far. The rest of the game more than makes up for it. Combat seems more deadly, and enmies seem to react more to being hit with weapons. Oblivion and Fallout would have to holding down the attack button and bouncing your weapon against an enemies face until they died and the physics turned off, ungluing their feet and sending their corpse careening off whatever tall thing i happened to be fighting on. Seriously, it annoyed me that enemies would happily keep running towards you through barrages of fireballs (or rockets, in fallout) only to loose that last 1hp and suddenly go flying off. They werent reacting to the blast before, so why bother putting in ragdoll physics? In skyrim combat, enemies react to being hit. They flinch and stumble, and you do too. It's not perfect, obviously, but its better.

What's more, they did the one thing i was always asking for, which is making a spellsword an actual viable class. The starting spells are actually effective - you dont need to be a giant magika resevoir to use them more than once an eternity, and they have a decent range to them too. Also,
the Summon Familiar and Flame Rune spells are badass. The story is much more cinematic, too - the fight with the first dragon in Whiterun springs to mind here. I felt epic, but i felt like the NPC gaurds fighting it alongside me felt like they werent just there to be decoration, and they didnt steal the show, either. They were equals, and we killed that thing together. It was awesome.

But my favorite thing about the game so far is the crafting dynamic. No longer is making your own custom items the reserve of very late game high level mages who are bored. You can learn Smithing as one of the first things to do in the game, and making your own items is easyish and quite rewarding. There's nothing more satisfying than walking out of town wearing entirley armour you forged and tempered yourself, and with a trusty old weapon back from the first dungeon that you've kept relevant by reforging it and keening the blade. ALL of the crafting systems are just.. better. Enchanting is easy, but requires you to spend time practicing on smaller stuff to get the good stuff. It's reverse engineering, really, no longer "Level up this school of magic until the numbers say yes." Alchemy REALLY got an upgrade - the number of known properties on ingredients is no longer determined by level, but through scientific trial and error, experimenting to see if it works. Plus the alchemy GUI got an overhaul from Oblivion's awful one. Potions you know how to make are listed, and items you know have the required properties get listed when you select it, and you can just go to "Imma gonna mix a bunch of items together and see what happens" mode to learn more recepies. It's all very good.

So why am i waxing lyrical about a game that everyone who cares about it bought a month ago? Because, well, for the first time in ages, here is an RPG that actually impresses me. It's the first one that's managed to have mechanics that arent awful, combined with a compelling world with amazing graphics and characters and places i'm actually interested in. Im looking forwards to exploring it over the days to come =p