I want to avoid repeating what other writers have commented on, I’m not going to lay everything out for you, I’m assuming you’ve already read a review from mainstream press so I’m not going to be talking about the mechanics of the game. What I’m going to do is describe my experience through a mostly self-imposed quest of curing myself from a disease.

In the 30 hours I’ve played of Skyrim I have not fast-travelled and I have not taken a cart to any landmarks. My only form of transportation has been by foot or by my own horse, ‘Miks Horse’. I’ve been through 3 horses, each one has cost me 1000 pieces of gold and the loss of each one has been tragic. The first horse fell to a troll, gallantly the horse charged the troll after it had witnessed me getting my arse kicked. As I was healing up the horse fell lifeless and with exaggerated rag-doll physics, I was genuinely upset after spending a good 4 hours with the horse. I made sure to kill that troll by Dragon Shouting it off a cliff and finishing it off with my bow. The second horse was struck down after 6 hours by two mages who I had underestimated. On approach to a desolate ruined castle, out of nowhere the mages struck in ambush, my horse lay dead on the ground with several ice shards sticking out of its body. The mages were too much for me and I had to run away but I will be back for them, when I’m ready – they will die.

This is an example of the unwritten, emergent narrative this game tells through its wonderful world simulation. The task I set myself of going back and killing those mages is a full adventure and journey in of itself, if I allowed it to be. To kill these powerful mages I would need to know how to properly defend myself against magic so I decided to go to the collage near Windhelm on at the far northernmost part of the country. The journey alone would take a fair while due to the mammoth mountains I would have to either circle around or pass over. I didn’t realise though that this agenda of revenge would set into motion a deeply personal story.

On my way back to the closest town after loosing my horse I was ambushed by two vampires, I killed them but one of them infected me. I didn’t even know there were vampires in this game so I had no clue as to what it would do to me. It seemed to impact very little so I assumed that it only affected a small stat change to my attributes. I shrugged the infection off and carried on forward, I bought a new horse and then headed to one of the main cities in the middle part of the country Whiterun. A couple of days had passed since being bitten and the only change I had noticed was that during dusk and dawn the screen would blur and I’d get a message saying, ‘You feel a strange hunger’.

I spent some time in Whiterun unloading loot (those dragon bones are heavy!) and getting caught up in some social politics between the people of the city. A day or two after being in Whiterun I was suddenly hit by the second phase of the disease, all of a sudden the sun burned my skin, my magica and stamina wouldn’t regenerate and I had been granted strange conjuration powers like being able to bring people back from the dead as zombie slaves. I found the handicap too much to handle so I made it my primary objective to cure myself of disease.

I had no clue how to do this, I thought about looking on Google but this would be cheating I thought. I had enough faith in the game that somewhere in its massive world would be instructions on how to cure myself. I was sure it would be through alchemy or a particular blessing stone but to be honest I had no idea. My first move was to go looking for books, staying in Whiterun I scoured every book I could find looking for anything either about alchemy or vampirism, I couldn’t find anything and the longer I kept looking the worse my condition became.

Something surprising then occurred, I approached someone who was asleep and I interacted with them to start a conversation, I was greeted with two options; ‘talk to’ and ‘feed’. Feed?! As usual with my moral tendencies in videogames I am against killing an innocent but through desperation for any sort of information about what my disease was about I decided to feed on the man. I didn’t kill him and I got a message saying ‘you vampiric powers recede as you feed’. So I thought that this was how I cured myself but feeding on enough people.

That night in Whiterun, I broke into and sneaked through every NPC’s house as they were sleeping and fed on them. It was quite a challenge to do this out of sight from the guards and in one beautiful, fleeting moment I felt like I was playing a Thief game. This was something I never expected to be doing in Skyrim, breaking into peoples houses to suck their blood in order to survive as a vampire.

Unfortunately no matter how many necks I bit, my disease didn’t go away so I assumed that feeding only tempered the illness. I needed to know more and luckily by pure chance I decided to ask an inn keeper if he had heard any rumours lately. Keep in mind that it had been about 4 hours since my horse was killed by mages and I was ambushed by vampires. The Inn keepers said about a guy in a town who’s into all sorts of dark art such as vampirism.

Genius – the game threw me a bone, the game would know that I would want to cure myself from being a vampire and it left a small nugget of information for me to follow, it was enough of a lead. All of a sudden finding a cure became a real quest in my log-book and I had seamlessly slipped into pre-described path laid out by the developers. I set out to meet with the wizard who would help me, (I’m avoiding names and towns so that if this happens to you there’s still something to discover). The wizard said that there is a cure but I needed to trap a soul into a black gem stone in order to start the ritual which would help me. He gave me no instruction in how to trap a soul but he did sell me a black soul gem, which is nice.

By reading the description of the gem which said if you kill a human within 60 seconds of laying a soul trap then you capture their soul. I didn’t know how to set a soul trap so I tried killing a bandit by first dropping the gem on the ground and trying to kill him within 60 seconds. Of course that didn’t work, a soul trap is a spell so I thought the best thing to do is to carry on my course to the mage college in the north.

On the way there I got caught up in several quests, I visited many towns and places of interest. Skyrim has a way of getting you into quests without you really noticing, it’s very seamless; you could be firmly committed to a task but then before you know it an hour has passed and you’ve done a side-quest where you inhabited the memory of someone who had died. It’s remarkable how Bethesda do it and I haven’t yet been able to properly analyse how.

I spent a good deal of time at the college, working through the initial quests and lessons, at this strange my disease had reached a bad stage where people were intimidated by my appearance and I was becoming progressively weaker during the day. Eventually I spoke to a mage in town who had items for sale, he had a soul trap spell book and I enthusiastically bought it. My time spent at the mage college meant that I had all the magica and skill I needed to cast the trap. Quickly galloping back south to talk to the man who would cure me I managed to kill a bandit and trap her soul, I had everything I needed, it had taken 6 hours.

Just shy of the town I needed to get to I was presented with my toughest task, two dragons attacked me during the day. I was at my weakest with reduced HP, magica that didn’t regenerate and no stamina. The fight lasted 15 mins, I threw everything I had at the dragons using everything I had acquired since being bitten and eventually I killed them both and learned a new shout.

It felt like I was on my last legs by the time I reached my saviour wizard, he led me deep into a dank swamp and performed my ritual. It lasted about ten seconds and then he just walked off. The game didn’t let me say thank you.

After I had been cured I didn’t really know what to do, I had lost track of my objectives, what I was doing or what the main story thread was. Seven hours had passed, seven hours! That’s as long as the entirety of most AAA games these days, I had killed dragons, spent time in a magic college, one of the most simultaneously elaborate and grounded places I’d seen in a game. I had travelled through time, sneaked through a bandit infested stronghold and I had stalked the night in search of prey to feed off.

But this story isn’t quite over there’s still an epilogue to this minor tale; as of my last save I am with my horse outside the abandoned castle where the two mages are who killed my second horse. I have since gone back and completed my mage training at the college and I’m ready to take these fuckers down.

This is one of the most incredible experiences I’ve had with a videogame. In a period of iteration and competent but predictable releases at the end of this console cycle, Skyrim stands as a testament to what the last 6 years of games has achieved and it glimpses at what is ahead for us. I’m excited about what games are capable of again and I can’t wait to see what games are like in the next 6 years to come. Skyrim isn’t perfect, there are issues with straight sword combat and there’s a few ridiculous bugs in there but for a game that does this much and offers real, genuine freedom of exploration and interaction, all set in the most appealing, mysterious and unique landscapes crafted with this much fidelity, subtlety and design…I just can’t fault it.

[9]

About the author

Michael Manning

Michael is a sound designer and composer working in the games industry. His portfolio can be found at www.manningaudio.com