My first time with Skyrim

 Fond memories by the campfire

In the months that lead up to that day, there were certain times where I thought I couldn't breath from the anticipation. Torn up inside by the possibilities of what could, and should, be; I would jump up and down in my seat gripped by the chaos of the excitable and touched with the madness known as hype. Oh, I was a fool back then; hopeless and hopeful, driven by imaginary, conjured desires; all stemming from happenstance for a type of game I wouldn't have blinked twice at just a couple of years previously. How could it be that I had fallen so spectacularly for the promise of fantasy? Sure, I was a fan of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, but I wouldn't march onto Trafalgar Square, dressed as an Uruk-Hai in order to spy the latest movie, but if it were a Skyrim event... I don't know. Perhaps that date had something to do with it; '11/11/11', something almost ordained from poetry, how could you not fall for the whispered magic of a promise like that? Then, on the day of release, I got a detention.

You don't understand how ridiculous that is, at least for someone like me. I never had detentions or the sorts of problems that would lead me to have to spend any longer than was absolutely necessary within the premises of school; but on that day, the day of destiny I had waited so long for, a day where I had pre-ordered for the first time in my life, I had to wait behind. There was almost something sickly appropriate about the whole thing, especially as the issue was ultimately just some wayward homework that had fallen aside in the hustle of the everyday. But I couldn't have asked for a better catalyst to really stew the pot of anticipation and set me off into hot sweats. Obviously I couldn't tell you the work I was tasked to do in order to be released home, because regardless of whatever my hands were doing, by eyes were drowning in a pixel world of imagination. By that point I had watched the E3 gameplay footage to an unhealthy degree, you see, and could quite literally replay the whole thing in my mind and in front of me, so that was what I spent that final hour between me and Skyrim doing. Daydreaming.

Now nine out of ten times you would probably likely see that I'm setting myself up for absolute disaster here. "Dreaming about a game that hasn't hit the market yet? Future Cyberpunk fans would like to have a word with you about 'sanity'". But Skyrim wasn't just any old game. Back when Bethesda was at that sweetspot of small enough to still care and big enough to make the big projects, Skyrim would come to be their Magnum Opus. 'Though the years to follow would be fraught with 'die hards' analysing the minute details and claiming 'Oblivion did this better' and 'Morrowind did that better', at that time it was undeniable that on it's own Skyrim was a beast with the power to rewrite the very standards of the industry. What a fantasy game could be before Skyrim and what it had to become after Skyrim is a vast chasm apart from one another, and I personally think Skyrim lit that ever so gentle RPG spark over the general public, introducing that scourge I call 'light RPG mechanics' across the industry. But what was my experience like? 

Well, rather embarrassingly for someone who let themselves be swept away by the promise of an 'endless world' RPG space with possibilities galore; I ended up playing the exact same way I had seen in all the trailers, footage and gameplay walkthroughs up until then. Yes, I was lured in by the promise of playing however and wherever I wanted to, but in truth I wanted what I had seen already. Sure I could be a mage, a sneaky rogue, any combination of that I could dream up thanks to the adaptive class system, but I didn't want any of that. I saw what I wanted. Which is actually, if I'm being honest, a grand mess-up when it comes to how one should be viewing RPGs. I mean, who's role are you playing? The developers? Where's your personal stakes, the heart of your character, of your adventure? The hook that makes the game last with you far off the screen itself? By all accounts I should have disillusioned myself with the roleplaying world entirely from that misfire experience. Obviously that didn't happen.

If there's thing I remember feeling from those first few moments loading up and playing through 'Skyrim', it was this sense of contentedness, a feeling that my expectations had been met and this was everybit the game I was waiting for. A simple wild perspective given how long and how dearly I had pined for the game, but an advantageous position I suppose when everything was said and done, much better than being disappointed. I remembering playing all the way from Helgen to the first Nordic ruins in the hills above Riverwood, stopping just after the introductions to the traps-system. (I couldn't tell you how giddy I was watching the fire shoot across oil in something approximating realistic spread.) My first experience was, thus, strewn with the giddiness of a schoolboy, because that's all I pretty much was, not the jaded cynic of today. (Ah, the innocence of ignorance.)

In many ways, Skyrim was a watershed moment for myself as a lover of the gaming world as much as it was for the industry and 'open world gaming'. I didn't realise how rare something like Skyrim was, how unnatural it would be for a game of that magnitude to be that untarnished by the whims of corporate decision-making. (Heck, given the many re-releases and extras Bethesda has thrown atop of Skyrim; that's a perspective I haven't even been able to keep either) All I knew was that at that time I learnt that games could create an entire world for you to just inhabit, and I wanted every bit of that. I wanted to explore new worlds from the ground up and live within that, any world and every world. That's probably what spawned my willingness to try almost any genre of game too, I wouldn't want to miss out on some immersive experience that someone else was having. Some in someway, I'm directly blaming Skyrim for my current obsession with CRPGs. (All the pain I suffered during 'Throne of Bhaal' is blood directly on your hands, Todd Howard!)

The proceeding however-many hours which would make up my initial playthrough in Skyrim (obviously nowhere near my last playthrough) resembled the fervour of a hungry kid at a buffet table, because I sampled everything. Sure, that's the way I would come to play every game I ended up loving down the line, but nowdays I make some sort of justification in my head. Why is the Harbinger of the Companions going to join the wizards over at Winterhold as a novice? Well it's actually a mission of faction relations, he 'joined up' with the college merely as a measure of politeness. Why would a soldier of the Empire become an Assassin for the Brotherhood? Well perhaps after finishing the war he became disillusioned with the aimlessness of it all when the real enemy is sitting in the imperial throne consorting with the Dominion. We make these sorts of excuses and reaches of logic for the games that we love. By the end of my playthrough, I had tried everything that Bethesda had to offer. (Which I could find. Surprisingly I missed all of the Aedra quests in my first playthrough.)

We all have those big moments, or products, that influence the way we see things for perhaps the rest of our lives. Maybe it's a book which evolves your perception of written literature, a movie that breaks down the very tenets of the three-act structure before your very eyes, a TV show which deftly crafts the a world more grand than the boldest movies, or a game which makes you forget the world around you completely and utterly. When it comes to gaming I of course have several different moments like that, with different games of different genres, in fact I think I've had an 'eye open' moment with a least one game of every genre I love today. But Skyrim was, and will remain, one of the most special to me. Alongside the first time I discovered Metal Gear or when I finally understood the world of Dark Souls and what it was saying. Alls of which is to say: I should really get around to a proper review of that game one day with all the subjectivity of my jaded modern self, see the ways in which it still stands up and the ways it falls short. Stay tuned.