This Review is as Late as the Patches Were
Our review of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is finally here. We know we're a bit tardy but there's a pretty good reason for that. Please don't give us any demerits.
Published: December 21, 2011
Act Three
This review has been sitting as a Google document at this very point for some time now. I guess you could say that it was cryogenically frozen or something of that nature. Between the time I wrote the past three pages and started work on patch 1.03 (on December 17) I have watched this game win award after award. While watching the Video Game Awards on SpikeTV all I could do was sit and speculate just what game these critics had played. Yes, Skyrim is an absolutely fantastic title and it is deserving of a lofty amount of praise. However, I can’t help but shake my head and wonder if the industry and fans as a whole are just willing to accept all of the technical problems and game breaking bugs just because of the names on the box. I’m sure there are plenty of readers out there who will have played through the game with little to no problem. In fact, I know someone who platinumed the whole game and didn’t have to deal with directionally challenged dragons, heavy slowdown, or any other affliction. It’s just that my personal experiences were soured and all of the issues I ran into were compounded and made worse.
Still, patch 1.03 was a glimmer of hope. Even though Bethesda came out earlier in the month and stated that the lag wouldn’t be fixed I was at least hoping that the issues created by their previous patch. Well, the first thing that I noticed was that the load times weren’t fixed and that reloading a save or from a checkpoint was as lengthy as ever. The performance problems were also back in full vengeance and after just a half an hour or so of play I would find the game chugging to keep up. Still, I knew coming in that it wouldn’t be fixed though it is a disappointment to see that absolutely nothing was done to at least minimize the effects.
Having not taken but a mere six or seven steps I found myself in a battle with a dragon. Thankfully it was flying in the correct direction though I still had issues with getting it to land. No matter what I tried, and trust me I threw everything possible, I couldn’t get any cooperation. After multiple encounters in a variety of settings I am happy to say that the multiplying dragons, random deaths, and massively damaging seem to be in the part. I say seem only because this could easily change and some of you may still report issues. In fact, after a quick venture to a few message boards I still see dragon-related glitch reports popping up. For now, at least, it seems that the biggest and game breaking ones are over with, though.
I did run into some things that were drops in the bucket, though. Townspeople would randomly lock on to chickens and go berserk. In Riverwood I watched a good eight to ten members of the town stalk a single chicken, weapons brandished or fists raised. It was an odd experience but as weird as it is to say I found it kind of charming. It was an amusing problem to have, unlike the previous issues that never caused me to throw the disc out of a window like a Frisbee. Then there was the magnetically attached corpses, which put me in a bit of a panic. During a dungeon mission I had killed a handful of bandits and when I stepped foot outside I found that all of their dead bodies had followed me. I didn’t think anything of it until I saw the corpses following after me in a long line. I ran over to different areas, fast traveled, got on a horse, and no matter what I did there was no way for me to shake this trail of shame that followed me everywhere I went. The NPCs I interacted with didn’t think anything of the problem and it actually stayed with me through a couple of different sessions. It went away on its own after a while but it was arguably the oddest thing I have encountered throughout my time in Skyrim.
All of this being said, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is still an absolutely great game. Bethesda continues to work at things and their latest patch has stabilized a lot of the problems found out of the box and after the second patch. Even though it seems like I did a lot of complaining and found issues that some may never see outside of YouTube videos, I still kept trudging on. The limitless quest potential and amazing world seen within Skyrim is enough to look past its flaws. With the slowdown and invisible walls neutralized I could see this as a true Game of the Year winner but as it stands it’s just a very, very good title that is brought down to Earth by its own bugs. Maybe next time I’ll skip the first six or so months of a Bethesda release and then take a wait-and-see approach to avoid any unnecessary headaches.
