Unless you have a lot of time, (that's not even scratching the surface), the combined technical expertise of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the ability to mimic the voices and sounds of virtually anything, and a whole lot of PCs, then sure.

However, I would recommend that you find a team at the very least.

All these people saying it's impossible...

Of course it's bloody possible. It would just take a large amount of time to learn each individual discipline in game development to an extremely professional level. It would just take you a very long time.

Pretty sure most people are saying that the time needed is the only reason it would be impossible. Most of us could learn to do any and all of the things required for it, but the time it takes to do it all is insane. Just making a few sets of armor with textures and placing them in a game like TES can take days or even weeks depending on how much time you would need to be at work(I mean you do need to eat right?). Even if you had all the money in the world just writing the code could cause blindness before you are halfway done. (plus if you had that kind of money why not just hire someone to help?)

Since I don't know exactly how many man-hours went into creating Skyrim, I don't know if it's possible.

Assuming you sleep 7 hours a night, and allowing 2 hrs/day for maintainence (food, hygiene, shopping), that's 15 hours a day. About 5500 a year. Multiply that by the number of years you expect to live. That's how much time you have.

If the number of man-hours that went into Skyrim is greater than your total, it's impossible. If it's less, it's possible.

Of course, by the time you finished, the game would be as obsolete as Pong or Pac-Man.

I think one person could do it, but the time it would take someone would be tremendous.

Short answer: No.

Long answer: You COULD, I guess but it'd take decades of no free time. And also, Bethesda, a large group of trained professionals, left a fair number of side quests and even a Guild quest broken and couldn't even make it WORK on PS3 until long after launch.

Everything was hand drawn, and they packed the game a lot, so there are a lot of glitches and thus a lot of coding that would have to be done. You also have to be creative to make ways to lighten the load on the game, for example they got rid of greaves and just tied them into the torso equipment so they could put more people in the area at once.

But I'm no expert, I play on Xbox and know nothing about this stuff and from my perspective, creating a game like this by yourself is just short of impossible

It would take you fifty years to come up with a buggy mess that looked like scrib droppings.

Okay.
First, you would have to consider the game as a modular construct. You do not have to write your own renderer; there are plenty of freeware renderers under the GNU liscence out there (Crystal Space being my favorite, as it is cross platform). Audio subsystems likewise. There are entity systems out there, but most of them are slanted towards either FPS or MMO format games. Plenty of physics systems under GNU to use with a proper credit to the creator. You would most likely have to write the world handler, animation system, audio, video, and interacting entity system. The actual 'game' engine (the rules of the road, which has nothing to do with sound, video, or anything else. Get a GURPs manual and study how they determine things; this is the part you have to write yourself). Yes, one person can do that, and hammer the interfaces between the modules together so they can talk.

Unless you are incredibly talented, you would a modeler who could produce both low poly weightmapped figures, and architectural geometry in the style you chose. As well as gribble like swords, coins, jewel forms, broken masonry, etc. Most of the details on the meshes are most likely going to be either normal map or displacement map, so you would need someone adept at Photoshop or an equivalent program (and if you get a renderer that can take advantage of DX-11's full capabilities, then a clueful modeler and hot Pshop jock would be worth their weight in plutonium). It might be kludgey, but you can write your own 'creation kit' in Visual Basic, and make it as simple or complex as needed.

Writing the game script is like writing anything. Patience, practice, and having a good editor to catch what you didn't. If you go with voices, you can hit up the local college drama club. They might be willing to do it for a free copy of the game and having a gig as a voice actor on their resume.

You will need to know C++, and be willing to learn any skill you don't have. And it will take years......how many depends on what modules you can get readymade (and how actively they are supported; some of them you are on your own. Others have active communities, and are more than willing to help. Even to the point of modifying their release, or adding a feature if you request it). And you will need a beast of a desktop. Don't even think about using a laptop, except maybe for working out rhe rules system. You will need storage space, lots of memory, and the gutsiest processor you can afford. It would not be easy, but it can be done in a reasonable amount of time.....and any other team members you may need are as close as the net.

Maybe without voice acting, music composition, art and so forth.

First it require lots of skills, some at expert level, second it require loads of work as in 100 year work for one man.

I recommend to start moding. This way you skip lots of the hardest part and you can put together simple quests and dungeons in weeks, faster then you learn how.
I guess being an good moder count for a lot if you want to work with games, in addition you want formal education, programming or 3d design.

As I understand the guy who made the Oblivion overhaul mod work for Bethesda now.

Nothing is impossible, I suppose. I hope you've been saving up your money in your piggy bank.

I encourage you to check out some open source games to get an idea of the time frame involved in making your own game from scratch. Most such games have been under development for years and are still in beta. Some still in alpha. Most of them resemble classic PC games from the mid 90's. The more polished ones, like Wesnoth, Nexuiz, etc., have been brewing for a decade with a team of several, if not dozens of experienced developers.

Possible? The scope of Skyrim? One person. No. It took close to 100 people, not even counting actors, to make skyrim. 4.5 years to make, that's 180,000 man hours (without voice actors). 180,000 man hours, considering a 16 hour work day is 11250 days, or almost 31 years. That is assuming you can work 16 hours per day, every day, for 30 years. Figure a more reasonable 12 hours, that's 45 years, again, with no days off, not a single one. Now, consider where the gaming industry was 30 years ago... Telstar, Atari, C64... and consider where we are now. Do you think you'd have a viable application when complete? Now, create Skyrim in your spare time... say 20 hours per week... something like 175 years. Possible? Not humanly.

One of my friends here on the forum is helping with the Beyond Skyrim Sentinal mod. From what I know of it is Stros M'kai. This project has been very time consuming and they still aren't finished yet.
This is just a pic linked on profile page:
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8476/8135968401_73a0eb2e04_b.jpg

Some of the other renderings I've seen are quite detailed and look like something in Skyrim. The team is made of many many individuals who have been working diligently on this for quite some time.

A one man team for the scope of Skyrim? Too tedious to handle. For one person at any rate.

Oops, messed up, the 180k hours is a year figuring 225 workdays per worker. So, multiply everything by 4.5... so, breakneck, nonstop pace puts you at closer to 140 years... undoable.

We're talking about climbing a mountain here... and the thing is; by the time you were to finish the game, it'd probably be outdated. It took the folks of Bethesda years to complete this game.

My idea of the perfect CRPG would be Wizardry 6 with updated graphics and a construction set. Please someone make this.

You would always be remaking it as your hardware became too old. Unless you are only planning on playing the game yourself on some old antique computer or a console so ancient only retro gamers use it. And no way could one person do a game as complex as Skyrim, you would be aiming for something a lot simpler.

Toby Gard's Galleon which was only released for the Xbox and was done with a very small team took almost 7 years to make, with several restarts. It is impracticable for one person to do an Xbox 360/PS3 game, it would take you years to get the necessary skills and you would never live long enough to finish the game.

And a single person needs a way to make a living while investing time in a hobby, so unless you are rich you could never do it. No publisher is going to pay a single person to make a current gen game all by themselves. You want to make games by yourself do something simple but fun for one of the phone gadgets. Maybe you could get lucky and get it released on PSN or XBL

A game like skyrim on your own, from scratch? no, time would be the biggest factor working against you. Attempting this would end up being a waste of time since it would become outdated within a few years. Now is it completely impossible for one or two people to make a decent sized game on their own? of course not, after TES 3 came out me and a friend were inspired to create a Morrowind clone just to see how difficult it would be. Other than a heavily modified Gamebryo 1.0 engine, we started from scratch... it took over 4.5 years to make a game that was 2/3 the size with about 3/5 of the content of Morrowind. Of course we didn't have any voice acting or amazing music and by that time, Oblivion had already come out.. but we did end up with a pretty good game according to our friends at the time.

If you do intend on going through with your aspiration of being a game developer, just try not to bite off more than you can chew or else you'll end up not finishing projects or making outdated games. Start off modding after you start learning and building up the skills necessary, it's great practice.

By the time one (super genius) person was able to create a game like Skyrim and release it into the market, it would end up being like introducing the first Elder Scrolls game into the current game market, in the sense that it would essentially be obsolete due to far more advanced technology, etc.

EDIT: Also, the people who create mods for Skyrim have the Skyrim Creation Kit, so it is more like playing with a far more advanced version of a sandbox construction game (like my favourite: Roller Coaster Tycoon 2). They don't do any of the super technical, insanely time consuming stuff.

The raw basics of the game - the battle mechanics, skill system and generic interaction with NPC's is doable if you limit yourself to poor graphics, a linear plot-line, small world and no sandbox elements. If you want to create the sensation of an actual WORLD, however, that's when you need the horsepower. That's where all of the infinite complexity lies.

If your not coding your own game engine ...it isn't from scratch.


I wouldn't worry about what the level of "From Scratch" you use as to begin with, you'd have to be quite the savant to handle everything from level design and scripting to music.

If you want to make a game, maybe make an indie-style 2D Scroller. It is likely the easiest to plan out and code for, not to mention the easiest to polish. If it is any good and offers a few hours of gameplay, then you may even get it to be sold on Steam for $2-$5 or whatever.

If you just want to tinker with game making, you could get away with using Bethesda's Creation Kit [which you can find video tutorials for] or these engines:

http://source.valvesoftware.com/sourcesdk.php
http://www.unrealengine.com/udk/

If you learned all the skills needed and had the equipment it would not be impossible. Bur making a game such as skyrim on your own would take extremely long time. Game engines would have been upgraded many times over, the top of the line graphics you started out with would be old. Beth had many employees to handle things. All on your own, even if restless worker it would take time.

http://www.crystalspace3d.org/main/Main_Page

This is what I am talking about. Look about at what passion can do....

As to the 'you must upgrade the engine(s) constantly' that is flawed logic at best. No software is ever finished using that method; you have to choose a stopping point, and make yourself adhere to it. I know a lot of people and worked a few projects that had a stable build on oh, version 1.11a of a package, a new 1.5 build was released and had a couple of cooooooool bells and whistles.......and the project died. Because those cool B&W broke every bit of the stable build. And the simple truth is if you are 75% done on a labor of love, then have to go back and rework 60% of your labor due to one bell, you either burn out or just quit in disgust. Or if you dig in and plod along, the results isn't that great. Look at the history of Duke Nukem Forever, and the number of engine changes and upgrades that shredded that franchise.

As far as worldsize issues go, google E-on Software and download the trial version of Vue. You've seen this software in action before; Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail (best example is when the vehicle is hanging on the edge of a cliff. All you see below the cliff is Vue generated), Pirates II (remember when Jack Sparrow was being hauled along by the cannibals? The real life part of that was a grassy field. All the mountains, trees, low hanging clouds, etc, was Vue) Avatar (lots). And Vue does things fractally and procedurally. Yes, there is a mode where you can shape each and every contour.....but you turn to procedurals, and you can literally create a planet. You can dive from high orbit into the atmosphere, through the cloud layers, pull out and race along the treetops (you need Vue Infinite or Xtream, a lot of time, and a beast of a machine to render it.....but talk about cool). You shouldn't expect to be able to use Vue content in a game engine, due to the high poly intense raytrace action, but the terrain editor can produce displacement maps to drive a lighter terrain engine -with-.

Yes, gamesas had its biggest dev team this go around......but most of that new talent was in the area of level designers and dungeon builders. And that is a resource available to anyone. Lots of level designers work that as a way to get into the business. Find a few who get off on your project, put the tools in their hands, and watch the magic happen. You get some of the most tedious work done by the motivated, -they- get their designs in a working game, and a show reel to add to their resume.

Are the days of writing the next Ultima in your garage over? Pretty much. There's too much weight on eye candy and ear candy. You can get some of Andre LaMothe's older Game Guru books and write a 90's era CRPG......and listen to the candy crowd bawl and hoot. But there are solutions out there, if you do the research (and are willing to pay for some of them). Did you know you can get a full body motion capture system for slightly over $6k? Look up Arena Mocap System. -That- started as a labor of love by one person.....and look at what it is now. Yes, it will take years, and dedication. But with a willingness to use the resources out there, it is far from impossible....