On a beautiful date 11.11.11 one of the most epochal, iconic and most famous video games of the last decade was released. TES 5: Skyrim celebrates its eight-year anniversary, and over the years it has been said so much about the game that repeating all this once again seems vulgar. Instead, the outgoing FreeMMORPG editor wrote a text about his difficult relationship with the game, thinking along the way how the whole world had changed since the fifth The Elder Scrolls was released.
Since release TES 5: Skyrim eight years passed and it happened in some completely different the universe. At that time I was in my second year of college. But the recollections of how a certain fourteen-year-old shket, already unfamiliar to me, are daybathing and spending the night in Obl, were still very fresh. My first PC appeared late, but, perhaps, for the better, because adventures in TES 4 for an impressionable child were more real than reality itself.
After 13 years of graphics Oblivion it wore out quite a bit, but then rapidly developing technologies entered into a very powerful symbiosis with a constantly fantasizing children’s mind. It’s funny, because all this gray provincial reality with rusty fences, bus stops and drunks pasted with tear-off advertisements in every yard now seemed something false and not real. Little-known domestic musician sang “I am Russian, and therefore live on the Internet.” And I lived in Cyrodiil.
But on the day of release TES 5: Skyrim I was almost an adult. Frozen psyche gradually began to build barriers around its most mysterious zone, which allows us to completely forget that I just play a video game. However, the irreversible process was just starting its dirty business, and I had high hopes for this game. Then fifth The elder scrolls came out, and for some time the material world again ceased to exist for me. And even more: Skyrim immerses in itself much more than ever before.
Anyone who at least once froze with delight, capturing the moment of some eternal and living moment of beauty in the night skyrim sky with the aurora borealis spilled over it, accompanied by almost church motifs Frostfall Jeremy Soule understands what I’m talking about. As one who understands with delight in the Black Reach understands. Designers Bethesda this time they did just some incredible work, because the panoramas that open to the eye on the lands of the Nords can cause almost religious reverence.
After spending about a thousand and a half hours in the game, I sincerely believe that it owes a lot of deafening success to its design. In the world The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim damn nice to be. TES 4 he is very far in this regard. And the reason for this is not only the imperfection of models, textures and lighting, but also the work of designers. World Oblivion consists of identical and, we recognize, rather fresh landscapes, and Skyrim combines many climatic and cultural zones, making the environment and travel sensations visually diverse and often changing.
This is no less important than other reasons for the triumph of this landmark game. Exploring, for example, provided food not only for the eyes. Exploring hundreds of locations TES 5: Skyrim gave the sensations of a personal adventure: dull fourth-floor dungeons with NPCs going back and forth began to dilute unique quests and scripted scenes, Nordic priests dropped unique masks and frightened them with their mystery, and notes scattered here and there told stories that happened in dilapidated abandoned forts and Nordic dungeons . A clear and not too deep combat system made the process simple and relaxed, and the abundance of mods made it possible to customize the game for itself, making it more complicated, thoughtful and diverse.
Well, how can one not mention the opportunity for the so-called “acting out in the head”? It is worth rolling the mod with an alternative beginning, as the annoying Dovakin-prisoner became a young adventurer from a provincial Nordic village, who set off with burning eyes in search of fame with his best friend.
To admit, being a poor student, I played a lot more in a pirated Skyrim than in an honestly bought one
After spending about a thousand and a half hours in the game, I sincerely hated TES 5: Skyrim. Acute rejection quickly gave way to complete indifference: the last time I launched it on October 2, 2015. Having studied Skyrim to holes, I began to pay attention to what had previously been hidden by the magic of a mixture of components from the previous paragraph. And if the broken balance is completely brought to an acceptable state by the mods, then you can’t hide other problems of the game with this. The simplified RPG system deftly removed the focus of role-playing to the gameplay aspect. Everything else will have to be thought out and imagined, because the tasks TES 5: Skyrim they will never want to test your specialization to give a unique passage option, and rarely make you think of an interesting moral dilemma.
Skyrim generally designed so as to reduce the role of the player in what is happening before the choice of the style of battle, and so that he does not even notice it. There is rarely a curious branched quest, and an obsessive marker directly on the screen will indicate the path to the missing courier, where the character is unknown, although the character does not have any guesses about his location. Why should a player look for a messenger who has disappeared without a trace, for example, following his route and questioning the owners of taverns? Why force a player to brainwash and conduct his own investigation if you can just send him to run away from point “A” to point “B”? And if inferior TES 4 guild branches in isolation from Oblivion still not bad, and the combat system, which without mods turns into a call simulator, is still simple and unstressed, the engine is regularly annoying with a curve and scripting tight.
This may sound strange, but finally all the magic of TES 5: Skyrim crashed for me when in the vulnerability quest in the Dark Brotherhood lineup, the security inspector and the son of a large legion commander stood in the tavern for more than 12 hours instead of facing the wall to inspect the imperial barracks.
My feelings for TES 5: Skyrim can be anything, but it does not stop me from realizing the greatness of this game and recognize the skill of jumping above my head Bethesda. Just like it doesn’t stop me from seeing that now the studio is making very dubious decisions. Since release TES 5: Skyrim eight years have passed and the series The elder scrolls practically canned. In the literal sense: instead of full games Bethesda stuffing fans with cheap canned goods in the form of a good, long-playing, but refined TES Onlinesqueezing money from lovers of lore and characters TES: Legends and no less obsessed with this desire TES: Blades (not a word about Fallout 76 in this text!).
Finally, Bethesda became a hostage to its own engine, piling over unstable multi-storey card houses of technical lotions over the moldy and rotten GameBryo. The studio languishes over the long-term result of its work, like Koschey over gold. It’s scary to even imagine how backward might look The elder scrolls 6 at the time of record-breaking powerful hardware inside the next-generation consoles.
I am adding this text, and my heart is somehow sad. In 2019, games are increasingly less likely to give unique and fresh sensations, because large publishers prefer stable and working methods of earning. The industry is overloaded with remakes, duty sequels to the hell of boring franchises and long-playing profitable business schemes. The end and the edge is not visible to that: tens of millions of “gamers” annually buy a new FIFAwillingly spend heaps of money in Fortnite and twist the knobs of the lootboxes, and politics and a tolerant left agenda under the approving buzz of the audience give some stinking and propaganda news color to my beloved way to spend leisure time.
