March 15, 2025 to be exact: Steam was having a big sale for whatever reason so I decided to pick up a few old and cheap games that still have replay-ability. Skyrim was a big one that stood out to me, being one of the huge milestones for gaming way back in 2012. It was only $10 bucks so I said what the hell and bought it.
Looking at today's prices it appears as though the $10 really was quite the discount, with the special addition being jacked back up to $40... what a ripoff for a 13 year old game. They're also launching Elder Scrolls VI next year... 14 years after the previous game, so that should be interesting. What are they gonna charge? $100? I honestly might pirate it lol.
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/10hvfh4/the_year_is_2012_video_games_are_called_skyrims/
Of course back in 2012 this game was far more expensive than $10... and it's also single-player, making it an excellent candidate to simply steal and play a pirated version. I haven't ripped a game in quite some time... and doing so can be buggy, miss out on key cutscenes, or be straight up infected with spyware. Now that I'm so heavily involved in crypto I have a policy of not inviting random executable files onto my Windows operating system. Plus I'm not a poor college kid anymore so I can afford paying for things. And it was only $10 so whatever. I was not disappointed.
Skyrim (and all Elder Scrolls games for that matter) is famous for its choose-your-own-adventure style of gameplay. You don't pick a class in Skyrim. You don't have to decide if you want to be a mage at the start of the game only to realize you've gotten bored and would rather do something else.
If you want to cast more spells you get more magika and regen, while if you want to bash skulls in with an axe you'd prioritize more health to be a bit more tanky. Stamina lets you sprint longer, do power attacks with weapons, and carry more equipment/weight in your inventory.
Skyrim is Elder Scrolls V (5), while Oblivion is Elder Scrolls IV (4). I've potentially even played The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, but that game launched way back in 2002 so honestly I don't even remember; if so I definitely didn't buy it and might have even played it after beating Oblivion. Although now that I'm looking at Marrowind I see that it uses more of a class system (which looks very familiar I must have played it) which puts it in a completely different category than Oblivion and Skyrim.
What I can say for sure is that Oblivion was quite difficult until I learned how to exploit the mechanics of the game. It seemed like every time I tried to engage in melee combat I would end up dead quite often, so I opted to start using a bow for the range. Then I realized that Conjuration allows you to summon pets to tank for you so you don't have to run all over the place trying not to get hit. That was the easiest way to play.
Hide in the shadows shooting arrows for huge damage bonuses... then when you get caught summon a demon from the void to tank for you and continue shooting arrows. It's somewhat of a game-breaking combination (of which there are many in Elder Scrolls games) but more importantly it gets boring very quickly, and once you've committed to a strategy it can be hard to change to something else due to how level scaling works.
Elder Scrolls games are one of the few titles out there where you can actually get weaker as you level up. Normally in an RPG you'd always gain strength when gaining a level, but in Elder Scrolls your enemies level up with you, so if you just blindly level up abilities with zero strategy your character will gradually become weaker and weaker compared to the enemies you're forced to fight. This is a very counterintuitive mechanic for anyone who doesn't know it's happening, and can lead to quite unfavorable outcomes. Luckily there are many difficulty options that can be adjusted so the noobs don't get wrecked and give up entirely.
The difficulty adjustments in Skyrim are beyond lazy and ridiculous. The only thing that changes is how much damage NPCs take vs how much damage the player takes. The game is balanced around the default Adept difficultly (1x/1x), and I would recommend that this setting never be changed because of how ridiculous it is to tweek these settings to break the game on purpose.
Because it forces you to play the game in a very particular way... the way I just described earlier: arrows and pets. If the only thing that changes is how much damage you're taking, then you have to pick a strategy in which you never get hit at all. If NPCs are also harder to kill then you need to pick a strategy where your build can crank out constant attrition damage (burst is out of the question). These factors completely ruin and break the game by taking away all the options that are supposed to make it fun to begin with... so don't change the difficulty.
- The difficulty modifier doesn't decrease player damage dealt, but rather NPC damage taken. While the distinction might seem odd, it means that enemies do the same reduced damage to other NPCs that you do, making companions and conjured atronachs/undead incredibly useful.
Again, it's actually enraging how lazy the difficulty modifier is. As I have stated twice now, conjuration is already the most overpowered ability in the game, and at harder difficulties it becomes completely a non-optional requirement for survival because the damage modifiers don't even affect it. Harder difficulty makes followers harder to kill. Stupid.
This becomes extra annoying because the pathing and intelligence for pets and followers is so bad and glitchy that making those glitchy bugged clunky units the best thing you can have in the game is borderline idiotic... especially considering they've chosen to make this design choice on purpose for multiple games in a row.
Being a skill-based game instead of a class-based game means that leveling up depends on which skills you become more proficient with by using them. These 18 skills are organized into three groups of 6: The Mage ; The Warrior ; The Thief. They really want you to get that old school D&D vibe without actually having to choose one.
Right off the bat we can see that all The Thief skills are non-combat support skills, so it's not even possible to be a pure thief, as you'd still need to level up 1-handed weapons to dual-wield daggers like a rogue in World of Warcraft... or get Archery because that's the transition skill between warrior and thief. In reality you'd probably be getting both, and might even throw in some Illusion magic because it's very roguelike.
All the warrior skills are very straightforward and boring. Hacking and slashing your way through the entire game is an option but you're still going to be picking up defensive spells from restoration and alteration along the way. All the real options and interesting things that can happen usually stem from the ability to cast spells and stealth around in my opinion, but I'll get into that in another post.
Skyrim, and oldie but a goodie. There's a lot of things done wrong on this game and a lot of things done right, but it's still playable even 13 years later. I suppose the absurd $40 price tag reflects that. Not worth buying at that price but was definitely worth it at $10.
In my next post on this topic I'll be discussing one or two alternate builds I came up with instead of just playing the same tired old overpowered strategy. The main one is a spellsword wizard while the other one is just a pure mage elementalist (pretty boring but comically overpowered compared to all the complaining that noobs do when it comes to the Destruction tree).
