Hello Skyrim!

Screenshot game Skyrim, featuring river and woman.

Not unlike home.

The Elder Scrolls V: SKYRIM already appears in my doomed third attempt at a novel this month. There, the main character is on his way to buy the game, and in his excitement he collides with a car on 11/11/11 at 11:11:11. He then wakes up in Daggerfall, 500 years after the Elders Scrolls games, in a female Breton body.

I seem to have escaped with my life so far, but naturally I pressed “Enter” on 11/11/11 at 11:11:11, as is good and proper, to enter the kingdom of Skyrim.

Skyrim, land of the Nords, is the northernmost province of the continent of Tamriel, where the Elder Scrolls games take place. From the very start of the series, the place has been pattern on Norway, although the names of people and places are more like a mixture of Danish and Old Norse, with English and Old English. It is amusing for a Norwegian to find a lake named Geir (a common Norwegian male name), and the game starts in a small town named Helgen (which could mean “saint”, “the weekend” or even “the guy called Helge”, although the latter is a West Norwegian usage mainly.)

The locals are blond, strong, tolerant of cold, and the men are usually bearded. The architecture is inspired by the Viking age, complete with stylish dragon heads. (The place reminds me quite a bit of the Viking part of the multiplayer game Dark Age of Camelot. It helps that the size of the game is also similar. It is truly huge for a single-player game.

As for the dragon decorations, they are somewhat ironic in this game, for it has dragons, and they are not friendly. Well, one of them is responsible for the main character’s escape inches from the headman’s axe, but that is somewhat of a coincidence. Or is it? In any case, the dragons are supposed to be the main enemy faction of the game. I, however, have only played the game for one short day (and I even managed to get a walk in), so my character is still level 3 and still gets scratched up good by the local bandits near the starting area. No dragons for a while, I hope. The things are HUGE. Big as houses.

Skyrim continues the Elder Scrolls tradition of letting the player do whatever he or she wants. There is a helpful character giving advise and fighting for you during the first quarter of an hour or so, perhaps a little more, which serves as a tutorial to the game. They have changed the controls a little again, so a tutorial is appreciated. After that, however, it is up to you. There is a main quest and the reviews says it is the best of its sort in the series, but there are a lot of other things to do. It is a bit like a Sims game with fighting, I guess. You can collect stuff and craft weapons and armor or potions or magical equipment, and sell them for profit. You can buy a house and furnish it. You can even marry, although I haven’t heard anything about babies.

The game is supposed to be theoretically endless, as the game engine creates new minor quests based on your experience so far. Of course, the same was the case for Daggerfall, but I still stopped playing it after a bit more than 5 years. I expect it to take substantially less time with this game, since real life has been upgraded since then…

I can’t really call this a review, as even many of the first impressions are not my own. It is more like explaining where the day went.  But I would not be surprised if I end up doing what I did with Oblivion, traipse around the landscape and take photo-like screenshot.