Skyrim First Impressions

Hey, y'all! Wow, I've already missed another TWO days on my write-every-day initiative. I'm on a roll... or well, not on a roll, as it were. I gotta get on this thing.

Anyhoo, it's almost 4 in the morning, and I'm writing my blog. I'm in the middle of pulling an all-nighter with my best friend. He's (finally) playing Mass Effect 2, and I'm observing, because the story is THAT good. Plus that gives me lots of time to do things like blog. And sort Magic cards... lots of things that I could've spent the last week of my vacation doing, but things like Skyrim kept getting in the way.


Speaking of Skyrim, I've got some initial impressions to tide us all over until I can finish beating it and write an official review. The game is LONG, so I'm not sure how long it will be until I finish. I run into a problem that I always want to experiment with different charter classes, so I've created about 5 characters so far. I still haven't found one I like any better than the others, which is either really good (they are all just awesome equally) or not (they are all meh). So far, I'm mostly leaning towards the former option.

The game is massive, like I mentioned before. The two characters that are furthest in the game are around 20 hours in and are just wrapping up all the side quests in the second town, at least, what I think are all the side quests. I haven't even really started in on the main story quests yet.

The beginning of the game, the introductory part before you can even start collecting weapons and such, is really epic. I have a giant soft spot for anything involving dragons, and this game does not disappoint. From the opening moments of the game, there are dragons flying around everywhere, and it makes me happy. Their design is badass, fighting them is epic, and killing them feels like a true accomplishment.

The graphics are, of course, jaw dropping. The scenery in Skyrim is beyond description. While fast traveling is available in this game, I often find myself huffing it just so I can explore the scenery. Climbing mountains and exploring forests is almost as good as killing dragons.

This is a pretty neat sample of what the landscapes in Skyrim look like. Click the image for a bigger version.

Yet more epic scenery. As you can see, walking around in this game is just amazing.

One of my favorite character classes in any RPG is the rogue. I love stealthy kills and everything that comes along with that title. This character class is one of the things that Bethesda has always struggled with. While the option to be a rogue or a mage was always available, the games always felt like they were designed with a warrior class in mind. Having played with my rogue for almost 20 hours, I can say that I haven't run into any situations that were flat worse for my rogue than my warrior. In fact, I've found a lot of the missions easier with my rogue, just based on the fact that the stealth damage bonuses are ridiculous.

So far I'm impressed by Skyrim. It does a lot to improve on a lot of the things I wasn't impressed with in Oblivion. I still have some concerns, as it relates to certain things, like the length of the main story line. It was pretty short in Oblivion, all things considered, and I really hope that Skyrim's main story quest line is much longer. We'll see.

Tomorrow, I'll let you know about how the all nighter went. Good morning.