» Tue Aug 16, 2011 8:44 am Anyway, here is my translation:
As one of the first journalists in the world, I get the chance to play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I couldn’t be happier – or more frustrated. You understand, Bethesda doesn’t make this easy for me. To get a hands-on for only one hour is like staring at the gate to heaven. The heavenly kingdom awaits, the forbidden fruit is to be consumed and happiness will become part of my body. But the glee has barely taken place before I am thrown out in the cold. Wonderfully and painfully short.
To get a justified impression of Skyrim in 3600 seconds is difficult. It helps a little that I visit the same place as Jakob saw in April and that I saw myself at E3. But now I am getting ahead of myself. First I created a character. As the usual Fredrik-style goes (himself,) I should have spend a lot of time tweaking the height of the nose, the lip size and the disgusting, but terrifying, scars. But this time I will settle with exclaiming: “Here exists a lot of races!” And then I created a broad-shouldered, blonde Barbarian. Alright then.
Todd Howard did not know what they wanted to show us at QuakeCon, but after a lot of thinking, they decided to give us an hour to freely explore the rocky area at the foot of Skyrim’s highest mountain peaks. It turned out to be a great idea. The Elder Scrolls isn’t about having the adventure served on a silver platter. Your own choices weigh a lot heavier that then games guidelines and pointers.
As I trot out of the dark cave for the first time, I encounter the chilly Skyrim on my own and it is up to me to make the following moment memorable. Howard and his team had turned off the main quest, so there are no epic dragon battles. Instead, I begin following a path alongside a rushing river. In the distance I see an archer, shedding (slaying/skinning?) a snarling wolf. I assume that this hunter is friendly – and he is.
But he is also a businessman and wants to sell me rabbit meat as well as wolf pelt. I buy nothing but becomes aware of the detail. Pieces of meat are all well-shaped (designed/formed/modeled) and I can turn them in all angles and really get to know the raw taste (eew!) I remind myself to peek through my own items and am met by a wooden shield with beautiful runes and a shiny blade with a carefully designed grip.
The Elder Scrolls series is for most people connected with the first person perspective. Therefore, I decide to take up a self-imposed challenge: To play Skyrim in a 3rd person perspective. This worked surprisingly well. I am the kind of gamer that has trouble connecting with my hero (character) if I don’t see him or her. Great stories needs great protagonists and to rest one’s eyes in the hero is always a good start. It also looks surprisingly cheerful and the animations are strikingly docile. However, the battles become less precise and a colleague warned me that the bow and arrow from that perspective “was a hassle.”
I have acquired a goal for my journey. From my last glimpse of Skyrim, I recall the sleepy, but picturesque village of Riverwood. This time I end up on a path that takes me higher and when I first see the small town, it is the roofs of straw and their smoking chimneys that first meets my eye. I navigate myself downwards, along the next trail I see and step into the empty (actually says: “void-of-people”) streets. But even now the epic fairy tale stories don’t fall in my lap. I am the smith of my own happiness (Scandinavian expression meaning that you create your own happiness, no one else does) and thus I decide to do a breaking and entering. In the armory I found 10 lockpicks. It was... lucrative.
Seven broken lockpicks later, I am grateful. To pick a lock is harder than it looks. With the one pin you have to pinpoint a weak point, whilst the other one turns the lock. If you manage to turn it 90 degrees, the door will open. But one millimeter of miscalculation (say, 88 degrees) and you lose focus – and a pick.
Well, when the door finally slides open, an Achilles heel shows itself: The loading times are annoying. You are offered a 3D model of a bed or a dragon statue which you can look at from different angles. But it does not make me (strangely enough!) forget one second, which slowly passes. When the game freezes at such a sequence, just as Todd chants: “Five minutes to go” it is no wonder that the anger is blowing out of my ears. Since it is a beta version we are playing, I’m thinking that I won’t write the charge on the minus account yet (meaning that he won’t count it as one of the major flaws,) since things may change at the premiere.
Apart from perplexities and a cow stomping to the beat of the sorrowful music, I come across surprisingly few embarrassments. With a game of this magnitude, which isn’t even finished, it is extremely promising.
After overfilling my inventory with cheese, mammoth steaks and dried herbs, I decide to look up some hardcoe action. One of the games 120 dungeons should be well suited and by coincidence, and abandoned mine is just at the edge of Riverwood. As I managed to find the gaping, dark hole that was the entrance, I was not alone. A cute girl was guarding the entrance, but I assumes she was friendly. She was not.
Todd has made sure that we were ridiculously strong and one parry, a swing and a fierce finishing move later, I prepared myself to enter the dark cave. Only the fantasy limits what awaits inside. Demons? Dragons? Treasure? Traps? ... Well, not really. But a loading screen that won’t ever say goodbye.
Better luck – and more time- next time. Skyrim will be released November 11th for Windows, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.
