So I just played Skyrim for (probably) the last time. And that’s a big deal. Let me explain.
I love playing big, sprawling, open-world video games. I’m not very good at it, so I always play on the easiest settings, but I love the immersive experience of exploration, puzzles, discovery, and (yeah) combat. Like many others, the game that defined the genre for me was Skyrim, which came out in 2011. I played it for several years, on various devices (PCs, handhelds, consoles), and every playthrough I found something new. (Sometimes it had always been there, sometimes it had been added in a new edition of the game or a mod from the Creation Club.) And from Skyrim I moved on to the various Fallout and Assassin’s Creed games, and then Witcher 3, Horizon Zero Dawn, and the Ghost of Tsushima. After each of them, I found myself coming back to Skyrim (and sometimes to Fallout 4), even though the graphics and gameplay were looking increasingly dated. Familiarity, I guess.
Last year Bethesda, the team that created Skyrim, released Starfield. It was widely panned. I bought it, played it through, yawned, and went on to other things. This year, the first add-on for Starfield appeared. It wasn’t all bad, but it was disappointingly repetitive: the main quest, culminating in a manic “fight your way out of a collapsing ship/building before you die“, had been done to death (pun intended). Enough. Oh, and the graphics weren’t a patch on Horizon Forbidden West. (Just compare the Va’ruun Citadel with a Horizon cauldron.)
Waiting for a couple of games to be released in the fall, I decided to do another Skyrim playthrough. Basic game, no mods, take my time, pay attention to the little details I often overlook. Without mods, the game really showed its age, but it was clearly a much better, more immersive, more carefully crafted world than Starfield. And even though I was stopping to smell the roses (and found some charming details I’d previously missed), I still zipped through the early part of the game, becoming arch-mage at the college, and signing up with Ulfric’s Stormcloak rebellion.
And then it all went wrong. With the Stormcloaks, I attacked Whiterun and defeated the Jarl. I returned to Ulfric, and waited for my next mission. He wouldn’t give me one. I wondered if I’d forgotten to finish something at Whiterun, so I opened my map. Whiterun had disappeared. I travelled to a nearby town, and “walked” from there to Whiterun. Even though there was nothing on the map, the town was still there, and the Jarl was still on his throne. There was no sign of the conflict, no loose end I could clean up. I travelled back to Ulfric. He still wouldn’t give me a mission, nor would he initiate the attack on Whiterun. I was stuck. And I didn’t want to go back to a save from a few days ago and go through it all again.
Even after 13 years, it’s not surprising that a game like Skyrim still has major bugs… but I don’t have to put up with them. That bug destroyed the spell. There are so many better games to play, and I will. Bethesda’s simply lost the plot, and for Skyrim, Starfield, and Fallout are history. (And so, I fancy, are the Assassin’s Creed games.) When I get back from Massachusetts, I’m going to replay the remastered Horizon Zero Dawn, and dive back into Baldur’s Gate 3 – until Avowed appears, anyway.
