The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Plenty of video games promise universes compelling enough to let you live in them, but how many actually deliver? Since its inception in 1994, the Elder Scrolls series has consistently been on the front lines of immersion, giving you ever bigger and more elaborate realms to explore on the continent of Tamriel, and more ways to experience life in those places than you can brandish a quarterstaff at. The quantum strides made in Morrowind (2002) and Oblivion (2006) continue in the newest installment, Skyrim ($59.99 for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360), which provides the most delicious perspective to date on this fascinating world over which you have almost complete control.

Unmatched Realism
Essentially, everything that was true about the previous games' eye-popping open-endedness remains true here. You may pigeonhole yourself into traditional CRPG categories if you like: It's no challenge to set yourself up as a warrior, a wizard, or a pickpocketing miscreant, of either gender, of any of ten species, and with just the physical and facial characteristics you desire.

But there's nothing to stop you from pursuing any other course that strikes your fancy, either. Buy a house in town and hold down the electronic equivalent of a nine-to-five job. Engross yourself in researching the intricacies of spellcraft, alchemy, or cooking. Meet and fall in love with almost anyone you want, of any gender, of any species. Wile away your days hunting deer or wolves in the forests, then strolling into the nearest town and peddling your spoils. There are functionally no boundaries: The game becomes whatever you want it to be, for as long as you want it to be that. (There's also an official plot, which we'll get to presently.) Yet the game is well enough designed that the plethora of choices available to you never becomes overwhelming or exhausting. You're never forced into anything, so you may complete quests or fulfill your own goals at a pace as leisurely or as frenzied as you like.

Skyrim's devotion to detail hardly stops there. As you wander the land, you'll completely lose yourself in the trees, the rivers and waterfalls, and especially the mountains: Bethesda Game Studios has outdone even its superlative work in Oblivion to create a hyper-realistic gaming environment where nature itself becomes magical. You honestly never know what lies beyond that bend in the road up ahead, or what you'll see when you reach the crest of that hill you're climbing?assuming you can see anything through the blinding rain and snow you can also encounter. At one point during playing, I encountered an honest-to-goodness whiteout, with the tundra-like land I was traversing and the frenzied snowfall around me making it all but impossible to distinguish the ground from the air.

Even in such situations, getting lost is not a concern, however. An advanced mapping system tracks where you've been, and you can ?fast travel? to any previously visited place by clicking its icon on the map. This means you might have some lengthy treks between townships or landmarks the first time you're going somewhere, but I never found these unmanageable.

Nor did they ever feel gratuitous or inconsistent, which is one of the stronger aspects of the game's design. The entire country of Skyrim, located in the far north of Tamriel, is carved from a generalized Scandinavian milieu that ties together all the characters you meet, and all the towns you visit, within a solid but believable thematic framework. Changes in design scheme and social differentiation happen as gradually as the changes in the weather, so by the time you've completed your journey from Whiterun to Winterhold, for example, you understand exactly what makes the action-oriented people in the former different from the scholarly inhabitants of the latter. Yet they're clearly still neighbors: different but the same. World building doesn't get much richer or more rewarding than this.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/ybI0a8uvbbQ/0,2817,2396056,00.asp

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