Don't worry, I'm not going to spoil anything here - I'll steer clear of anything story-related beyond the premise. With another game, that would be tricky. With Skyrim, the stories that come from how the game works are often the best ones.

It's a frozen nation, just to the north of where the previous game, Oblivion, took place. A pleasantly brief introduction sets up the plot: Skyrim is in the middle of a revolt, you've been sentenced to death, and dragons have just shown up. Good luck!

At that point, you emerge from a cave into 40 square kilometres of cold and mountainous country, and that's it. Everything else is up to you.

Even after spending hundreds of hours in Morrowind and Oblivion, the sense of freedom in Skyrim is dizzying. The vast mountains in every direction make the landscape seem limitless, and even after exploring it for 55 hours, this world feels huge and unknown on a scale neither of the previous two games did.




Not all of the landscape is subzero, and even among the frosty climes there's an exciting variety: ice caverns that tinkle with dripping frost crystals, hulking mountains with curls of snow whipped up by the howling wind, coniferous forests in rocky river valleys.

The mountains change everything. Wherever you decide to head, your journey is split between scrambling up treacherous rocks and skidding down heart-stopping slopes. The landscape is a challenge, and travel becomes a game.

It's hard to walk for a minute in any direction without encountering an intriguing cave, a lonely shack, some strange stones, a wandering traveller, a haunted fort. These were sparse and quickly repetitive in Oblivion, but they're neither in Skyrim: it's teeming with fascinating places, all distinct. It was 40 hours before I blundered into a dungeon that looked like one I'd seen before, and even then what I was doing there was drastically different.

These places are the meat of Skyrim, and they're what makes it feel exciting to explore. You creep through them with your heart in your mouth, your only soundtrack the dull groan of the wind outside, to discover old legends, dead heroes, weird artefacts, dark gods, forgotten depths, underground waterfalls, lost ships, hideous insects and vicious traps. It's the best Indiana Jones game ever made.



The dragons don't show up until you do the first few steps of the game's main quest, so it's up to you whether you want them terrorising the world as you wander around. A world where you can crest a mountain to find a 40-foot flying lizard spitting jets of ice at the village below is a much more interesting one to be in. But fighting them never changes much: you can just ignore them until they land, then shoot them from a distance when they do.

Your first dragon kill is a profound, weird moment. I rushed to the crashed carcass to loot it, then looked up. The whole town had come out to stand around and stare at the body, a thing as vast and alien to them as a T-rex in a museum.

I tried shooting an ice bolt at it, just to demonstrate it was dead, and the force unexpectedly catapulted the whole thing violently into the distance. A beggar looked at me and said, "Oh sure, just throw your trash around."



Your character gets better at whatever you do: firing a bow, sneaking up on people, casting healing spells, mixing potions, swinging an axe. There's always been an element of this practice-based system in Elder Scrolls games, but in Skyrim it's unrestricted - you don't have to decide what you're going to focus on when you create your character, you can just let it develop organically.

That alone would feel a little too hands-off, but you also level up. When that happens, you get a perk point: something you can spend on a powerful improvement to a skill you particularly like. Every hour, you're making a major decision about your character's abilities.

They're dramatic. The first point you put into Destruction magic lets you stream jets of flame from your hands for twice as long as before. As you continue to invest in one skill, you can get more interesting tweaks: I now have an Archery perk that slows down time when I aim my bow, and one for the Sneak skill that lets me do a stealthy forward roll.

Again, the freedom is dizzying: every one of 18 skills has a tree of around 15 perks, and the range of heroes you could build is vast. I focused on Sneak to the point of absurdity - now I'm almost invisible, and I get a 3,000% damage bonus for backstabs with daggers. It's the play style I've always wanted in an RPG, but I've never been able to achieve it before.



The enemies you encounter are, in some cases, generated by the game to match the level of your character. In Oblivion that sometimes felt like treading water: progress was just a stat increase, and your enemies kept pace. That doesn't apply now that your character is defined more by his or her perks, because the way you play is always changing.

Levelled content is also just used less: at level 30, my most common enemies are still bandits with low-level weapons. And I still run into things too dangerous for me to tackle.

Taking a narrow mountain path to a quest, something stops me in my tracks: a dragon roar. I check the skies - nothing, but I hear it again three more times before the peak.

At the top I find a camp full of bodies, with a large black bear roaring over them. Hah. He's still more than I can handle in straight combat, but as he reaches me I use a Dragon Shout. It befriends any animal instantly, and he saunters casually away. Feeling slightly guilty, I stab him in the back before it wears off.

Which is when the dragon lands, with an almighty crash, six feet from my face.

I run.



A roar of frozen air catches me in the back, but I keep going - over a ridge, down a short drop, and straight into a bandit. I dodge the bandit, straight into a Flame Atronarch. There are five more bandits behind it. The dragon is airborne. I throw myself off the mountain, several hundred metres into the river below.

I plummet to the riverbed, and swim until I run out of breath. When I surface, the sky is alight with fireballs and flaming arrows, the dragon is spewing a stream of ice down on the bandits, and I'm laughing.

The stealthy character I built in Skyrim would have been less fun in Oblivion. Whether you were detected was a binary and erratic matter. Skyrim cleverly gives you an on-screen indication of how suspicious your enemies are, and where they are as they hunt for you. It makes stealth viable even against large groups: if you're rumbled, you can retreat and hide. And there's a slow, methodical pace to it - long minutes of tension broken by sudden rushes of gratification or panic.

Magic, meanwhile, has been given an incredible crackle of raw power. Emperor Palpatine would be a level one mage in Skyrim - unleashing two torrents of thrashing electrical arcs is literally the first trick you learn, and it doesn't even get you tossed into a reactor shaft.



One tweak is a huge loss, though: you can't design your own spells. Oblivion's spellmaking opened up so many clever possibilities - now you're mostly restricted to what you can buy in shops.

While we're on the negatives, physical combat hasn't improved much. There are cinematic kill moves when your enemy is low on health, but whether they trigger seems to be either random or dependent on whether the pre-canned animation fits into the space you're in. Too much of the time, you wave your weapon around and enemies barely react to the hits.

The exception is archery: bows are now deliciously powerful, and stealth shots can skewer people in one supremely satisfying thwunk.

What does improve the general combat is a feature I didn't quite expect: you can hire or befriend permanent companions. I did a minor favour for an elf at the start of the game that earned me his loyalty for the next 40 hours of play. Sidekicks add a wild side to fights: an arrow from nowhere can end a climactic battle, or a misplaced Dragon Shout can accidentally knock your friend into an abyss.

The Dragon Shouts, gained by exploration and killing dragons, are like a manlier version of conventional magic. One can send even a Giant flying, one lets you breathe fire, another makes you completely invincible for a few seconds. Even the one for befriending furry animals is macho: it can turn four bears and a wolf pack into obedient pets with one angry roar.



Before I got the animal shout, I had a Sabre Tooth problem. Crossing a fast-flowing river at the top of a waterfall, a huge feral cat spotted me. A good shot with a bow made no dent on its vast health bar, and it splashed into the water to get to me. The current was too strong to get away in time, so I did the one thing it couldn't: turned invincible and threw myself off the waterfall.

After seconds of freefall, I hit the rocks, got my bearings, and looked up. The cat - a speck above - seemed to be looking over the falls at me. Then it slipped. Its lanky ragdoll smacked every rocky outcropping on the way down, and wedged between two stones directly above me, his huge head glaring emptily.

The first few quests you're nudged towards get you the Dragon Shouts. After that, the main quest is a bizarre mix of some of the best moments in the game, and some of the worst.

It fails where the previous games fail: it tries to make your mission feel epic by making it about a prophecy, then does all its exposition in the time-honoured format of old men giving you interminable lectures. The acting is stagey at best, painful at worst. And it adds a new problem: your dialogue choices are now written out in full, and your only options are to react like an incredulous schoolchild to every predictable development. It doesn't make it easy to feel like a hero.



The main quests themselves are mostly good: a happy mix of secrecy, adventure, and exploring incredible new places. One location, which I won't spoil, got an actual gasp. But then there's an abysmal stealth mission that seems to work on a logic entirely its own: guards spot you from miles away, despite facing the wrong direction. And the boss dragons it keeps throwing at you never get any more interesting to fight - adding more hitpoints just makes the repetition even harder to ignore.

Everywhere else, the quests are magnificent. Chance encounters lead to sprawling epics that take you to breathtaking locations, uncover old secrets, and pull interesting twists. Even the faction quests are better here. It feels like Bethesda realised these became the main quest for many players, and built on that for Skyrim. They start small, but each one unravels into a larger story with higher stakes. Some of them feel like the personal epic that the main quest has always failed to be.

We got a review copy of Skyrim the day the game was officially finished, but it's curiously buggy. Among a lot of minor problems such as issues reassigning controls, there's glitchy character behaviour that can break quests, and AI flipouts that can turn a whole town against you. And the interface isn't well adapted to PC: it sometimes ignores the position of your cursor in menus. There's an update due as soon as the game's out, but there's a hell of a lot to patch here. Next time, maybe don't commit to a specific release day just because it has a lot of elevens in it?



These aren't engine issues, though. Skyrim is based on tech Bethesda built specially for it, rather than the middleware engine used by Oblivion and Fallout 3. It's a lean, swift, beautiful thing. New lighting techniques and a fluffy sort of frozen fog give the world a cold sparkle, and the previously puffy faces are sharp, mean and defined. Even load times are excitingly quick. On maximum settings, it runs at 30-40 frames per second on a PC that runs Oblivion at 50-60 - a decent trade off for the increase in scenery porn.

There's a lot of that. There's a lot of everything, and you have totally free rein of it. Skyrim feels twice the size of Oblivion, despite being the same acreage, just because there's so much more to see and do. Searching for Dragon Shouts is a game in itself. Exploring every dungeon is a game in itself. Each one of the six factions is a game in itself. So the fact that the main quest is a mixed bag doesn't hurt Skyrim's huge stock of amazing experiences.

The games we normally call open worlds - the locked off cities and level-restricted grinding grounds - don't compare to this. While everyone else is faffing around with how to control and restrict the player, Bethesda just put a fucking country in a box. It's the best open world game I've ever played, the most liberating RPG I've ever played, and one of my favourite places in this or any other world.

In case I'm not getting it across, this is a thumbs-up.

 
Game director Todd Howard has already mentioned that Skyrim will have unlimited dragons, now he's said to Wired that there will be infinite quests, too.

There's a series of scripted quest lines, of course, which will follow the main plot and a number of subplots like those belonging to Skyrim's various guilds and The Dark Brotherhood, but once you've completed these, Howard says that the Radiant storytelling system will continue to generate tasks. These can involve stealing gems for the thieves guild, or assassinating NPCs for the Dark Brotherhood.

“The vibe of the game is that it’s something that you can play forever,” Howard said to Wired.

Howard says that these randomly generated quests are designed to lead players into interesting parts of the world they haven't visited before. Even major quests will have randomised components that will send players to unvisited areas.

“The world is probably the one thing that sets apart from other games,” he said. “It feels really real for what it is … It’s just fun to explore.”

He adds that Bethesda have learned a lot from Fallout 3, where they challenged themselves to fill a blasted wasteland with dozens of interesting tidbits and unique areas to discover.

The infinite quests are sure to boost the projected amount of potential play time from "300 hours" to "the end of time", which is going to do terrible things to our productivity when Skyrim unlocks on Friday. You can pre-load Skyrim right now on Steam and Direct2Drive.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is now available to pre-load on Steam and Direct2Drive, letting you grab 99% of the files needed to run Skyrim. That should be about 6 gigabytes according to the system specs. Then the vital de-encryption data that will turn these files into Tamriel will be shunted to everyone at launch on Friday. Then the game will unlock and we'll all be able to finally play it ... almost.

Once Skyrim is decrypted, you'll then have to wait for another download before playing. Bethesda say that "All platforms going to 1.1 by 11/11/11" with a day one patch that "fixes some minor stability and quest progression issues." Skyrim's going to have a pretty huge world map, and there's bound to still be a few bugs lurking in there somewhere. Oblivion and Fallout 3 had problems with AI getting stuck in doors, objects floating mysteriously and other bizarre anomolies. It wouldn't be a Bethesda launch without a few of those hitting YouTube.

 
We haven't seen Tom Francis for a while. Oddly enough, his disappearance happened around the time we gave him that Skyrim review code. Where on Earth could he be? He's probably running a marathon somewhere, or studying renaissance literature and generally improving himself. Hopefully he doesn't overdo all that culture and exercise, we need him to turn in his Skyrim review before it gets released later this week.

Oh wait, I've just been informed that Tom's location IS known, and that during the first 48 hours in possession of Skyrim review code, he's spent more than 24 hours playing Skyrim review code, and in the interim, he dreamed about Skyrim review code. Our Skyrim review is likely to be quite thorough, but there may be a delay while we translate it all out of dragon tongue.

A post on the Bethblog on Friday announced that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is done. "We’re pleased to announce that after more than three years of hard work, the team at Bethesda Game Studios has completed over 20 versions of Skyrim — across multiple platforms, languages, and countries. That’s right, Skyrim is officially gold!" cheers the announcement.

The team celebrated with a drop or two of golden mead, which has already played its part in Skyrim's development.

Beyond the excitement of the fact that one of the biggest games of the year is finished and on its way into shops, it's worth noting that Bethesda are cutting this rather fine. Typically games go gold several weeks before release to give the freshly printed discs time to leave the factories and make their way to stores. Skyrim is out this Friday, apparently just seven days after being finished.

 
The latest "behind the wall" Skyrim trailer gives us a behind the scenes look at the behind the scenes video that will come with the Collector's Edition. But never mind all that, there's a moment towards the end that shows two dragons fighting each other. And there's some beautiful shots of the townships and fortresses tucked into Skyrim's vast, snowy crevices. There are 315 individual areas according to one of the devs in the video. We can't wait to loot all of them. And then loot them all again as a different character. And then bring up each object in Skyrim's 3D object viewer and slowly rotate them going "oooh!" Skyrim is out next Friday.

We've been speaking to Bethesda game director, Todd Howard about The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. So far we've covered small matters concerning crime reporting chickens, a disastrous marriage night and the lessons Bethesda have learned from Fallout 3, but it was only a matter of time before the conversation turned to the creatures that Bethesda have shown the most in this year's Skyrim demos, dragons! When will they appear, and how often will we fight them?

"You have to do a little bit of the main quest - just the initial stuff - for the Dragons to really start appearing, because it sits in with the story," says Howard. "After that point, the more of the main quest you do, the more Dragons you’ll run into. But it's hard to quantify it, they appear every once in a while. Not at a rate that is annoying... it still feels special."

"It’s hard to know how people will play the game and it’s a little bit random, so I don’t want to say if it’s once an hour or..."

What about those who decide to ignore the main quest and start exploring the world by themselves? Howard says that if players "don’t want to proceed in the main quest, they’re not going to get spammed with dragons."

"when one of them arrives, it changes whatever you’re doing at the time. You could be on a different quest, going to a town, and a dragon shows up, so you’re going to have to find a way to kill the thing or work with the townspeople or run away. So we spent a lot of time on that, and I think that the balance on that is pretty good right now."

Skyrim's is almost here. Come November 11, will you charge straight into the main quest, or will you pick a direction and start exploring?

We've been speaking to game director Todd Howard about The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Previously, he told us about Bethesda's problem with vigilante chickens reporting crimes, but he also discussed the changes that Bethesda have made since Oblivion, and many of them are inspired by Bethesda's work on Fallout 3.

Lesson one, Oblivion's progressions system, which had creatures levelling at the same rate as the player, has been overhauled. “’s a lot more like Fallout 3, where as you level up you are going to see harder things, but the easier things stay around as well.” says Howard.

There will still be combat where it’s tougher, but these battles will be against a new or uniquely named enemy, putting an end to the boring battle-churn that dominated the later levels of Oblivion. “You’ll still run into the weaker stuff and you’ll just decimate it,” says Howard. Bad luck, mud crabs.

Lesson two, Oblivion’s stilted random conversation system is gone. “There’s very few completely random conversations,” says Howard. “We’ve gone more towards a system, like we did in Fallout 3, where they have a specific conversation with a specific person about various topics.”

Thirdly, the environment has been made more interesting, taking another queue from Fallout 3’s rich tapestry of American wasteland. “We realised in Fallout 3 that that kind of environmental storytelling, where you come upon a little scene, is really good,” says Howard. “And so we’ve tried to do it a lot more.”

“Just about” every dungeon will have something unique in it, Howard says.

Tom Francis found many of those unique things, and killed them with lightning in our Skyrim preview.

Skyrim is just three weeks away, and excitement is running high in the office, especially in the part of the office occupied by Tom Francis, who has booked holiday from a job that involves playing games to play even more games at home. And by games, I mean nothing but basic sustenance and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Read about the first three hours or so he recently spent with the game in our Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim preview.

With less than a month to go, though, now is the perfect time to upgrade your rig. Thankfully, it looks as though you probably won't need many extras. Bethblog have released PC system specstem specs. If you've got a DirectX 9 card with 512MB on-board RAM, 2GB of system RAM and a dual core processor, you should be good to go. You'll also need "internet access for Steam activation."

Minimum Specs

Windows 7/Vista/XP PC (32 or 64 bit)
Processor: Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent processor
2GB System RAM
6GB free HDD Space
Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512 MB of RAM
DirectX compatible sound card
Internet access for Steam activation

 
Recommended Specs

Windows 7/Vista/XP PC (32 or 64 bit)
Processor: Quad-core Intel or AMD CPU
4GB System RAM
6GB free HDD space
DirectX 9.0c compatible NVIDIA or AMD ATI video card with 1GB of RAM (Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 or higher; ATI Radeon 4890 or higher).
DirectX compatible sound card
Internet access for Steam activation

 

This preview originally appeared in Issue 232 of PC Gamer UK.

My coffee is stone cold. I don’t even know how long I’ve had it, I’ve been so completely lost in Skyrim. I’ve been granted a generous chunk of time to play the very latest build of the full game – no restrictions on what I can do or where I can go. And I’ve only just finished creating my character.

At the start of the game, you’re being led to your execution. I’ve skipped to just after you get out of that, when you’re given one last chance to choose your race, gender and appearance before being let out into this vast and frosty world.

Bethesda don’t want to spoil the main quest, and neither do I. The reason to be excited about Skyrim is your own story: the unique string of discoveries and adventures you run into. And because it’s unique, I can tell you mine without spoiling yours.



Mine was the story of a scarlet-plumed Argonian with manic staring eyes. As I say, I spent a long time in character creation. Argonians are lizard men, and they’ve had a major overhaul in Skyrim: they look more monstrous, leathery, dinosaurian.

As in every Elder Scrolls game, you start as a prisoner with no history or status. But the war paint, scars and dirt you can add during character creation make it feel different this time. They’ve made it easier to make a character who looks desperate, bedraggled and fierce. Every race looks leaner and meaner: previously adorable wood elves have piggy, dead black eyes. Previously goofy orcs look fierce and tribal. Once aloof high elves look withered and cruel. And dark elves- wait, no, dark elves always looked like jerks.

My scary-eyed Argonian starts the game in a cave. At the other end, a dazzling light shines through chunks of blue ice, and as I step towards it, a prompt appears: ‘To Skyrim’.

Morrowind let you off a boat, into a misty fishing village overlooked by a giant tick. Oblivion let you out of a sewer, onto the shores of a shining lake. Skyrim lets you out of a cave, on the snowy slopes of a huge mountain. The craggy landscape stretches before you, half lost in the clouds. It’s one hell of a sight. I turn around and set off in the opposite direction.



This is what I love about Elder Scrolls games. I love not doing what I’m told, avoiding what I’m pointed at, and going where I shouldn’t. Anyone wanting to take the well-trodden path in Skyrim can head down that slope, discover the small town of Riverwood, and kill a boss spider in a dark cave. But we’ve seen all that in the E3 demo – I want to see the rest of the world.

A few minutes up the hill, I find a walled-off Nordic town I’m not allowed into. I hop on a few boulders and climb in anyway. Through a pair of heavy doors, I find subterranean torture chambers, and dead adventurers rotting in tiny cages. Only one seems worth looting – a robed guy with a book in his cell – but it’s locked.

Lockpicking is no longer a tumbler-tickling nightmare: you just swivel one pick to what you hope is a sweet spot, and try turning the lock with the other. It’ll turn a little if you’re close to the sweet spot, but turn too far in the wrong position and the pick snaps. It’s a system that works well in Fallout 3, and it feels slicker here.



Persuasion, by the way, isn’t a minigame at all this time. Certain dialogue options have ‘’ in front of them, and your chance of success – which isn’t shown – depends on your skill. I never succeeded at one.

The wizard has nothing much on him, but the book is worth it: it teaches me Spark, a streaming lightning spell. I try it out on a ribcage: a crackle of white energy leaps from my hand, jolting it across the room, and doesn’t stop. The roaring current keeps flowing as long as you hold the button. It’s an addictive feeling of power.

Back out in the wilderness, I decide I need a destination. The map, when I bring it up, is beautiful: a bird’s-eye-view of the world, in full 3D and rotatable to view its geography. Parts of it are swamped in mist because, apparently, it’s actually misty there at this moment.



I pan beyond the mountain I’m climbing now and look for the nearest city in this direction. Off to the east, the snowy slopes give way to milder forests running along a meandering river, and a few miles later the river leads to a city. I’m going to Riften.

You can’t fast-travel to cities you haven’t visited already, but I want to walk it anyway. I haven’t gone far up the slopes when it starts to snow – lightly, then heavily, then a full-on blizzard. A cold haze creeps over everything, and I can barely see where I’m going. I stumble on some carefully piled rocks, and follow a trail of these as best I can. Until I come to one that’s splattered with blood and decorated with human bones. Ah.

My compass indicates some kind of thing nearby, so I head to it. I could use a thing about now.



The thing turns out to be Orphan Rock, a huge mass of stone jutting out from the mountainside. Scrambling through the snow, I find a way to the top and peer out into the storm. All I can make out is what looks like a huge carcass to the east. I jump down to investigate, and realise it’s a horse: dead and twisted next to an upturned cart. I ‘search’ its ‘inventory’ and ‘collect’ some horse meat, then freeze at the sound of steel. I scan the wreckage for movement, and realise there’s a large, shaggily dressed warrior making his way around it, battleaxe drawn.

So about the new dual-wielding system. In your inventory, you equip an item or spell by pressing the button you want to assign it to: left or right. There are virtually no restrictions on what you can mix, so I’d mixed a flame spell in my left hand with the new lightning one in my right. And in the heat of the moment, it’s pretty natural to just hold down both.

The crackling torrent of fire and electricity takes even me by surprise. A separate stream shoots from each hand, but they’re so thick and chaotic that it often looks like one vast beam of lightning and flame. I can barely see the warrior through the dazzling blaze, but when my magicka bar runs dry there’s only a corpse. At which point, a long sharp object zips past my head.



Archers. Two of them, and I have no magicka. I will solve this by standing exactly behind a tree until I do. This is what they did for a cover system in fantasy times.

Unfortunately, the warrior has a friend with a sword and shield, and he knows his way around a tree. I need something else to attack with, so I bring up my Favourites menu. Your inventory in Skyrim is like a web browser, in that you can bookmark items and bring that shortlist up in-game. Time is paused while you choose, so it’s not like a hotkey system – a difference I was glad of in this tight spot. I’d bookmarked my best onehanded sword, and I had two of them, so I hit the left and right buttons to put one in each hand.

Melee combat is slightly more satisfying than in Oblivion, but light blows still feel a little unconvincing, and heavy ones still a little clumsy. My enemy was excellent at blocking, but I had a crucial advantage: I wasn’t going to ever stop attacking for any reason. Eventually he just couldn’t block all the blows from both my swords all the time, and he fell to his cuts. At which point, I had a full bar of magicka and my fire and lightning spells re-equipped. Charge!



I am not a skilful man, so it took my whole magicka supply to keep my dual streams on the first archer long enough to burn him to the ground. Back to the favourites menu: two axes! Against a man with a bow, this fight goes better – it ends when I bring both axes crashing into either side of his head with a special dual power attack.

Suddenly I’m alone in the blizzard, among the corpses of both the attackers and the travellers they evidently ambushed. I put my axes away and set off towards Riften.

The blizzard doesn’t let up, and it’s getting dark. I start looking for another thing. My compass suggests there’s a boxy thing with lines in it to the north and a triangular thing to the west – I’m not yet familiar with what these icons represent. I head for the boxy thing, and by the time I arrive it’s night.



It’s a small shack, lit by lamplight from the inside, and pretty glowing insects buzzing around outside. I try to catch one. ‘Sparkfly thorax collected’. What?! No! I didn’t mean- nevermind.

Inside, I find the journal of an alchemist who lived here for a while. I use his apparatus to try mixing a few potions of my own: any two ingredients with a common effect will make a potion, but you have to eat one raw to find out any of their effects in advance. In the case of Nightshade and Death’s Bane, I decide to forego the taste test and just experiment. They produce a strong poison, which I apply to a sword I will forget to ever use again.

Finally, I shut the door and decide to see if I can sleep through this storm – or at least the night.

The next morning the sun is shining, I have a bonus to my health and magicka for sleeping in a good bed, and it’s only a short trudge through the snow before it gives way to an autumnal forest: silver birches with rustling yellow leaves. Soon I reach a camp of half a dozen large tents, erected around a fire with a roasting spit. Imperial guardsmen are milling about in their Roman-looking armour, so I trade with their quartermaster and then try their cooking apparatus.



Cooking is a new feature where, as soon as you bring up the interface, all the imperial guardsmen around you draw their weapons, start shouting, and then run up the hill behind you while you gently stir a pot. Wait, I’m not sure that’s meant to happen.

I join the guards, but I can’t see what they’re reacting to. Following their gazes, I head up a hill outside camp, then finally see it: a Redguard woman in leathers on a high rock, raining arrows down on the camp below. I draw a newly purchased warhammer, itching to try out two-handed weaponry on someone relatively defenceless.

She draws a battleaxe. She runs at me, storming down the hill. I draw my warhammer back. She draws her battleaxe back. I swing. She swings – and an arrow hits her in the side of the neck, sending her flying off my screen and tumbling gracelessly down the hill.

Guys! I was having a dramatic hands-on preview moment!




Back at camp, I get the hang of cooking, then blacksmithing: both are basically lists of things you can produce that pop up while your character looks busy in the background. Cooking turns raw food items into stews that give you long-lasting buffs, such as a venison stew that steadily regenerates your health for five minutes or so. Blacksmithing turns metal ores into armour and weapons, but better item types are locked off until you get the right blacksmithing perk. I also had a go on their grindstone: you can sharpen weapons for extra damage. Elsewhere, you can use enchanting shrines to add spell effects to any weapon, and even destroy magical weapons to learn their enchantments and apply them to something else.

While I tinkered, a guard mentioned that the legion are always looking for help. It turns out you can actually join the Imperial Legion in Skyrim, and they’re one of a few non-guild factions.

Near the camp, I find a ruined temple of some kind, half-overgrown. I’m about to investigate when a halfnaked man runs up to me and gets my attention. Since this isn’t Oblivion, that doesn’t mean my head is sucked into his for a creepy conversation where his face fills the screen – I’m just turned to face him, rooted to the spot but free to look around while he talks.



“Here, hold on to this for me! I can’t keep it, but I’ll be back for it later.”

Since the item in question is a Battleaxe of Souls, I accept. Before the guy can even run off, a hunter appears.

“Have you seen a thief anywhere?”

I look round at the thief, then back to the hunter, and consider the axe in my inventory. “... no.”

“Damn. Well, if you see him, let me know, he has something of mine.”

As soon as the conversation ends, the hunter sees the thief and draws his bow. Not wanting to be left out, I draw my new battleaxe and crush the thief with an overhanded power attack. I look at the hunter, then back to the stolen axe I just used in front of him, and crush him with it too.



I’m still a long way out of Riften, and it’s taken me an hour to cross a patch of snow that looks tiny on the map. There are, however, a few horses here at camp. On the one hand, they’re not for sale and everyone’s watching me. On the other hand, woo! Horsey!

You now steer horses the way you steer yourself – they don’t use the vehicle-style controls of Oblivion. It’s not a dramatic change: horses are still just a reasonably fun speed boost, but one I badly needed to reach Riften.

I make excellent time galloping along the leafy riverside road, and I even stop to say hi to some Rift Guards who’ve made camp by the river near the city gates. This, it turns out, is a mistake.

The Rift Guards are a separate faction to the Imperial Legion, so they don’t much care about the bounty on my head for stealing this horse. But when I get back on my horse, they’re suddenly furious. He’s stealing the horse he rode in on! GET HIM!



This sort of lunacy will be a familiar tale for anyone who horse-rustled in Oblivion. But in other ways, the crime system is more advanced: each city is its own faction, so crimes in one don’t get you in trouble in the next. And if you can kill everyone who saw you commit a crime, you’ll get a notification that there are no surviving witnesses, and your bounty has been cleared.

Right now, though, this is bad. I gallop on to Riften inside of a minute, but arrive with arrows whizzing past my head and sticking in my horse. Two guards at the gates charge at me on sight. I try dismounting and putting my weapon away, the way you usually surrender to the guards in Skyrim, but they don’t relent. As much to escape their blades as any actual desire to be here, I burst through the city gates.

It gets rough. Guards are streaming in from every side street as I barge through the busy market in the centre of town, jump over fences and weave between bystanders. This is not how I wanted to see the city. I leg it through a gate in the walls.

Outside, something bizarre is happening. The Imperial Guardsmen chasing me for the first time I stole the horse have run into the Rift Guards furious with me for the second time, and they’re both much more furious with each other. A small war breaks out in front of the city walls, and for once I’m not under immediate attack. When there’s only one guard left among the bloodied corpses, I walk straight up to him, weapon sheathed: please, please arrest me. He arrests me.



In Oblivion, a few of your skills would atrophy as you rotted in your cell. In Skyrim, this doesn’t happen, but your progress towards your next point in a few skills will be reset. It’s a much milder penalty – I don’t even notice which skills I’ve lost progress in.

Finally exploring Riften without being stabbed, I find a remarkable city. A river runs through it, and in places the cobbled streets give way to sharp drops to the water below, wooden walkways running along the houses at street level. Below that, a network of piers connects the doors of grubbylooking subterranean dwellings, their doors almost at water level. From the chatter around town, I hear there’s a network down there called the ratways, where the Thieves Guild hide out. Rift Guards with ominous helmets that conceal their faces growl as I pass. In all kinds of ways, it reminds me of Vivec, Morrowind’s intimidating capital.

When I ask art director Matt Carafano about the other cities, he says they’re all unique. “We worked really hard to make those feel distinct. So Riften is a rundown lake town, but it’s set in the beautiful fall forest area. Whereas Markarth is built in an ancient dwarven ruin in cliff sides, so it’s very different. Solitude is more like a castle city, kinda influenced by an imperial style. Windhelm is an ancient Nordic fortress, so it’s full of really old Nordic architecture. And you have the city of Whiterun in the centre, which is a more classic Viking – almost mountain-style – city in the tundra.”



Back in the market, a shifty-looking man runs up to me. He’s impressed that I saw through the corrupt guard at the north gate, but he thinks killing him was a little harsh. I... what?

I deduce he’s a thief with some kind of scam going with a guard. That guard must have been killed in the fracas I caused at the city gates, and he’s assuming I rumbled his scheme and did it intentionally. That’s wildly untrue, but he’s so impressed with my instincts that I decide to accept the credit. He’s offering me work: he wants a vendor in town brought down, so he needs me to pickpocket a valuable ring, then place it in the vendor’s private chest. He’ll create a distraction while I work.

My new friend shouts to all the shoppers and vendors to gather round, and they do. My mark sits on a crate in front of some barrels, and as the thief rambles about a dragon elixir he’s discovered, I sneak up behind the vendor and rifle through his pockets. The moment I take the ring, he screams “Thief!” and the guards flood in. I am new at this.



I didn’t know it at the time, but in Skyrim, your chance of successfully pickpocketing something depends partly on its value. Rifling through someone’s inventory is no longer a crime – at least, not a detectable one. But when you take something, the chance you’ll get away with it depends on your pickpocketing skill, the weight of the item, and how much it’s worth. People pay more attention to their valuables, this rule implies.

I don’t resist arrest, but I’m not willing to serve time for this. As in Oblivion, you wake up in jail with a single lockpick, somehow secreted about your person. Unlike Oblivion, it was actually enough. Before long, I’m out – no skill-progress reset. Man, I should be in the Thieves Guild.

I decide to find the Thieves Guild. Not losing my skill progress pays off: soon I level up, and finally decide to rest. This is where Skyrim goes from exciting to a thing we need a new superlative for – not the resting, but the levelling up. Your skills improve as you use them, and improving enough skills increases your character level. That lets you choose a perk: a tweak to one of your skills that makes it more effective. So you have an element of choice, but you can’t pick a high-level perk for a skill you haven’t practised much: they have requirements.



The selection is literally dizzying. I have a sort of buzz in my brain as I scamper around the menu reading up on all the options I’ll never unlock in the time I have left. I have two perks saved up – you’re not forced to spend them as soon as you level – so I put them both into Destruction magic. The first halves the cost of all low level destruction spells, including my fire and lightning ones. The next enables dual-casting: when you equip the same spell in both hands, you can fire both at once for a single, disproportionately more powerful beam.

I blunder into a few dwellings before I find the ratways. They turn out to be a string of incredibly tight tunnels, dank and filthy. Almost immediately, I come out into a larger chamber and find a gaggle of thieves. Excellent!

They demand all of my money. Dammit, I forgot that was the problem with thieves. Renegotiating, I suggest that I keep all of my money, and they instead take all of the fire I’m now shooting from my hands. It’s a tough sell: some of them feel I should take one or two of their arrows in return, and one thinks his fists should be part of the deal. There’s only one thief left when I run out of magicka, so I bring out my warhammer and crumple him

Dead, he’s more generous: I’m suddenly the excited new owner of the Gloves of the Pugilist.



+15 damage on your unarmed attacks wouldn’t be much in another RPG, but Elder Scrolls games are stingy with stats. These gloves are a big deal.

It’s not long before I get to try them out. My first punch smacks a huge chunk off of my attacker’s hitpoint bar, so I try a power attack. I grab him, he disappears off screen, there’s a sickening crunch and I drop his limp body to the dirty ground.

Until now I haven’t seen many finishing moves, but with the gloves I’m doing them almost every fight. I stride through the ratways taking on all-comers, letting them close on me and then breaking them. I even discover you can mix spells with hand-to-hand combat: the funniest setup is to use a lightning spell in my left hand and keep my right as a fist. I shock people from a distance, then simply knock them out.

I’m coming to the end of my time with Skyrim, and increasingly anxious that I’m not going to find the Thieves Guild before Bethesda haul me away. The ratways are long and intricate, and all I’m finding are big chambers dominated by tree roots and rampant undergrowth. Eventually I find an even bigger area with a lake of fetid water in the centre, a jetty with tables and chairs on the other side, and a fire glowing behind it.



I creep around the edge of the chamber and see people sitting in some of the chairs. I realise it’s an underground tavern. And the people here all seem rather... thievey. Since the first rule of the Thieves Guild is that you don’t tell everyone who wanders into the Thieves Guild that this is the Thieves Guild, I check with Bethesda – yep, this is the Thieves Guild. I’ve found it at last.

Unfortunately, no one in the entire establishment wants anything to do with me. It suddenly occurs to me that the guy I failed the quest for earlier – you know, the thief – might have been a Thieves Guild member trying to recruit me. Whether because I messed that up, or simply because I don’t have an ‘in’, the Thieves all treat me like dirt.

I have about five minutes left. I put my gloves back on.



Before playing it, I wasn’t totally convinced Skyrim would be a huge leap forward from Oblivion. It is. For all the similarities, it feels like a new world, rendered at a new level of fidelity. More importantly, the new systems completely blow open the possibilities for evolving your character. I can’t stop thinking about all the possible combinations of weapons and spells I want to try together when the game comes out – pouring out lightning and fire at the same time was a feeling of power I never had in Oblivion.

And even more tantalising, the perks you can unlock open the way for ridiculous high-level characters. An archer who can slow time while he aims, knock people off their feet with his arrows, and run like the wind between shots. A conjurer who can bring his defeated opponents back to life, two at a time, to fight for him as zombies. Or a thief who can steal the armour off your back, pick a lock right in front of the guards, and even slip a poison into your bloodstream unnoticed.

I can’t shake the obsession Skyrim has left me with. I’m pulling screenshots up on my monitor just to feel like I’m playing again. I’m scribbling character builds on napkins. I’m replaying only the snowiest bits of Oblivion. And I’m wondering what the hell November is doing way over there.