The heroes, circa level 41.

I never liked The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I did play it, sure, but it got old fast for reasons I can’t even explain. Maybe it was the lack of hand-holding, with quests scattered all over the huge world and no easy identification of quest givers. Maybe it was the floaty physics and dull combat system. Bust most likely, it was because I played it on the lowest possible difficulty on the Xbox360 just to gain more achievements. Whatever it was that turned me away from Oblivion, I still have no intention of giving it another chance.

From that pretext, I have no idea why I like Oblivion’s sucessor The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim so damn much that, according to Steam, I spent more than 55 hours over the last two weeks playing it. The quests are still all over the place, the world is still insanely huge and the combat system is still more or less along the lines of “press one button and see what happens”. But suddenly, that doesn’t matter at all. Unlike Oblivion, I was sucked right into the harsh lands of Skyrim, and I have no intentions of departing before I haven’t seen all of it.

Spending that much time on a game – over 80 hours since I bought it – is an amazing feat for someone like me. I usually get bored and rush to the finale once I hit the 20-30 hour mark. In Skyrim, playing 20 hours almost equals to doing nothing, but not because the developers are padding out the content. A typical session begins with me choosing something to do, usually a side quest line I picked up somewhere. Checking the target, I find out that I need to travel most of the way to the destination on foot (there are horses, but they tend to die on me, so I ditched them long ago). Once I get going, I usually stumble over a cave full of bandits, vampires, spiders or what-have-you.

Well, it’s not the target of my mission, but I clean it out anyway. There’s a huge box of loot at the end of most dungeons, which is usually full of stuff I can barely carry. I hand parts of it to my companion – he’s a quiet guy and a good fighter, but he makes an even better pack mule. The dungeon took me anything between 15 and 60 minutes to wipe out, and I’m on my way towards the target, when a dragon attacks. Can’t have that! The dragon quickly falls to my sword and I loot a bunch of dragon bones and scales. They are very heavy, so I have my mule carry them. He doesn’t have room for all of them, so I pack the leftovers in my own bags. With the way this is going, a stop in town will soon be inevitable.

We are on the our merry way again when I spot a huge statue atop a hill near the road. Approaching it, I am addressed by an ethereal voice – the god the statue is build in honor of wants me to find some icon of sorts. I accept the quest and find out the target isn’t that far away. You can imagine where this leads to … hours later, I still didn’t finish the task I originally wanted to, but instead cleansed the god’s temple of false worshipers, killed several dragons, helped a jester fix his broken cart, not to mention the countless of caves I rid of evil. Oh, and let’s not forget the countless trips back to town to sell of stuff, store these damn dragon bones (boy, these things sure weigh a ton!) and craft more gear.

One thing I’m constantly in awe about while playing this game is how carefully everything has been crafted. Every village and town is different, there are no cloned houses or standard layouts at all. In fact, not even the house’s decoration repeats itself, with items hand-placed on shelves or scattered on the floor. All of the dungeons have been individually laid out – even the smallest iron mine – complete with rather devious traps and often beautiful interiors. Some even look that awesome that my companion often exclaims “Oh, that’s just … wow!”. Yeah, he’s a bit simple, but I recruited him by winning a brawl.

The Dark Brotherhood quests are pretty nuts from the start.

Compared to the insane wealth of fun Skyrim offers, the complaints I have about some of the systems feel like mere nitpicking. Sure, the crafting could be more interesting – cooking for example feels entirely superfluous, and so does alchemy. It certainly wouldn’t have hurt to let NPCs not repeat their chatter when running past them all that often – one can only stand so much “Staying out of trouble, Kinsman?” before thinking of getting into exactly that trouble by slaughtering the guard who constantly asks stupid questions. While the graphics are gorgeous for DirectX 9 standards, we are almost writing the year 2012, with  DirectX 11 being available since 2008. One could also complain that while there are truckloads of quests, most of them aren’t all that different from each other. Or that the companion AI is rather dumb, getting them lost, killed or at least incapacitated for the most idiotic reasons.

All of these concerns are definitely more or less valid, but in the end, none of them matter when you see the beauty of Skyrim at work. When the inhabitants of an entire village gather to watch you slay a dragon that is attacking their settlement. When you just travel the countryside and come across a woman who is just on a pilgrimage to exactly the same sacred tree you helped save a few hours ago. Or when you just can’t stop playing because there’s always one more dungeon to explore or another quest to solve.

One last thing: while I cannot stop praising Skyrim, it is unlikely I will give it another play through after I finish this one. Not because I don’t want to, but because if I do, there’s no way I can even hope to look at the other games on my plate for the next few weeks, and that would be a shame. Considering how the game is set up though, I’m betting on plenty of DLC, which will give me more than enough reason to return to Skyrim soon enough, and I’m definitely willing to accept that challenge. Unless it’s horse armor.