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ameSpot, a video gaming website that provides reviews and commentaries on games that are released, also agrees with this, with this comment on their site: “Skyrim performs the most spectacular of enchantments: the one that causes huge chunks of time to vanish before you know it.” Selling 7 million copies of the game in just the first week, Skyrim has captured and sucked in the time and lives of many people around the world, and will continue to do so for a while to come with its technological improvements, classic storyline, and the liberation that it gives from the real world.
this time to its draw distance, allowing you to look at something in great detail, be it as small as a fork to as a large as a mountain. Dynamic lighting also allows the game to create shadows for each and every structure/item. The Creation Engine also allows Skyrim to incorporate wind, giving weight to tree branches which affect how they blow in the wind, and allowing wind to affect the flow of water in a channel. “I think that the coolest thing about the views,” Kim says, “were the Auroras. They pop up every once in awhile, and they look so real that you’d think you were watching them from the North Pole.”
Skyrim can be conceived in radically different views, depending on whether the opinionator is a player or not. “Isn’t Skyrim just where you kill dragons?” Um says, having never played the game before. However, this is far from true. This “paradise” is filled with anything and everything that real life could and couldn’t offer, such as being your own “Dora the Explorer,” exploring the immense world of the land of Skyrim (the location of the game, not the game itself), chop wood, fight dragons, mammoths, assassins, bounty hunt, experience civil wars, quell or join rebellions, and see the popular “arrow-in-the-knee” meme.
Geography and landscapes are not the only appearances that are more than meets the eye. Towering castles, looming forts, and bright villages are also portrayed with great detail. However, something that may be more impressive are the ones that inhabit these areas. As you walk through the villages, you would think that you were walking through a zoo or a carnival show. Cat people, lizard people, orcs, elves, and humans are all cohabitating throughout the land of Skyrim, with the option to choose one of these races (and gender) available at the beginning of the game.
“You can spend forever just walking around the land and not doing anything,” former player Josh Kim says. Exploration is a large part of Skyrim. There is a “fast-travel” system which allow you to “teleport” (actually the computer causing you to walk super-fast to the destination, but it’s pretty much teleporting) to any place you have discovered before. This is considered to be one of the best features of Skyrim by several players, allowing you to save loads of time by not walking around all over Skyrim. The geography of the land itself ranges from steep cliffs to snowy mountaintops to grassy plains.
The NPCs (Non-Playable Characters) in the game to do whatever they want, have personalities, and act as real people would, by using the Radiant AI artificial intelligence system, which was updated from Oblivion. The Bethesda team also used Havok’s Behavior toolset to allow greater fluidity in movement, and increased the efficiency of the third-person camera. The toolset also allows you to converse with NPCs in real time, and allows them to perform things such as hand gestures.When interacting with these characters, they usually talk to you about random things, and every once in awhile give you requests which are known as “side jobs.”
“The view is breathtaking,” Kim says. “The graphics make it look like you’re looking at real life, not a computer screen.” The graphics are one of the most attractive and radical improvements made from the prequel of Skyrim, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. For Skyrim, Bethesda created a brand new game engine, called the Creation Engine. This new engine allowed Skyrim to apply the technological advancements of
09 | May 2012 | BANE BLADE
All art was taken from the Skyrim wikia page, a free resource site.