The Elder Scrolls series has long featured on players’ lists of the best role-playing games. With Skyrim’s enormous success in both visuals and gameplay, it reached a much wider audience than its established RPG following.
Bethesda has now remastered this award-winning 2011 game and released it as The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim Special Edition. There are no changes to the story or content in this new version. The visuals have been optimised again and the graphics have received major improvements. If you have a good computer, its atmosphere is bound to impress you.
A few rumours are circulating about why Bethesda made this move. Some suggest it was a way to remind players of the series and bring in fresh money ahead of a new Elder Scrolls game. It might also have been a case of wanting to make the game look a little better before selling new DLC. It is hard to tell. The game has been out for five years now; I don’t think another paid DLC will appear at this point.
I am not planning to review Skyrim in detail. As I said, the original game came out around five years ago, and plenty of Turkish and international sites have already published comprehensive walkthroughs. There is even a Turkish translation made by the oyunceviri.com team. Although I don’t think the translation is particularly successful, supporting such a rare and valuable group working in this field in our country is a responsibility for all serious players.
Skyrim Special Edition comes with the Dragonborn and Dawnguard DLCs. Personally, I found Dawnguard’s quest progression especially interesting, exciting and enjoyable.
I want to offer a few tips for anyone playing for the first time.
After level 10, the Dawnguard and Dragonborn DLCs become playable and their quests unlock. Couriers will deliver the relevant quests to you by letter. From that point, my advice is to finish the base game’s quests and side quests first. That way, some of the conversations you encounter in the DLCs will not feel disconnected. Think of it as a story: you should complete the original game’s quests first, including the main storyline, so that the DLC quests follow in the right narrative and chronological order.
If you are playing a mage, starting with Destruction spells and developing them first will make levelling up and completing quests easier.
If you are building a warrior, starting with two-handed attacks will make quests easier to complete. And, of course, make Health a priority when you level up.
As for why you should buy the Special Edition: perhaps it has been a long time since you played, and you fancy another go, this time with better, more realistic graphics. On a good computer, it really does look magnificent. You may remember that Skyrim’s map and atmosphere were wonderful already. Endless plains, deer running past, waterfalls, views from snowy mountainsides—who knows what thoughts they brought to your mind?
The game still has shortcomings in its gameplay. I should say that I have never quite warmed to its combat system. It feels very bland and simple. Especially after Assassin’s Creed and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Skyrim’s combat mechanics look and feel pretty poor. For a company as big as Bethesda, surely it shouldn’t be that difficult to create more attractive, cinematic combat: keeping a target centred during a fight, coding an elegant defensive move against incoming attacks, or, I don’t know, letting you dive into a crowd and stylishly take enemies down one or two at a time with a button press, crash-bang-wallop style (?). I’ll end my review on that note and share a few console commands for rookie RPG players who are struggling, without taking too much away from the game’s sense of reality.
Tim – I used this command for a while. Then, during a fight while it was active, my character’s head was chopped off in an animation. The character didn’t die, but he no longer had a head. Unfortunately, nothing I tried could fix it. From what I read online, there apparently isn’t a reliable solution for putting the severed head back either. I had to return to an earlier save. This command seems designed for players who don’t want to feel too much as though they are cheating, but don’t want their characters dying in inconvenient places either. All your bars, including health, go down, but you don’t die. Animated death sequences can still cause bugs, though. My advice is not to use it. Use TGM instead of TIM.
Player.setav carryweight ENTER A NUMBER – This command lets you change your character’s carrying capacity. I won’t lie: I have used this one quite often.
Player.setav shoutrecoverymult 0 – This reduces the cooldown on your Shouts to zero. In other words, you can keep bellowing FUS RO DA!!! and send everyone flying all over the place like loose cotton.
Tdetect 0 – This command prevents NPCs from detecting you at all. You become completely invisible. Run, jump, leap about—they don’t pay you any attention. They won’t let you into their little circle. They shut you out completely.