Skyrim: A Retrospective

I therefore restarted the game and, at the risk of sounding like a clickbaity, 'What he did next will shock you' post, decided to sack off the main story and do what I wanted, rather than listen to a procession of old dudes talking about my duty or the civil war currently tearing Skyrim apart.

So, Skyrim: the well designed world with detailed systems. That's a different story. I've found that if I see a well worn path cutting up the side of a mountain I want to climb it, and if there's a cave tucked alongside a river I'm crossing I want to go to there. I feel that in trying to play Skyrim as a game originally I was missing what made it special, and the care that went into a lot of the locations is evident as soon as I find them, and I explore a lot more efficiently now I'm not having to go and talk to someone each time I fight my way through a dungeon, but instead can pick my new destination from the top of the most recent mountain that I climbed.



There are problems with Skyrim's Enhanced Edition. It's still got that Bethesda jankiness and there are plenty of interesting bugs, but none that really blocked my progress. The real problem with the PC version is that it doesn't look as nice as the original release of Skyrim does with the right collection of mods. Take a look at what journalist Sam White has achieved here modding the original Skyrim, and the enhanced edition never comes close. Similarly, the original game has a lot of fan-created mods that fix 90 percent of the bugs and flaws in the original game and those don't work here so, for better or worse, this is a fresh start for the game, and if you're a returning player there's no compelling reason to play the Enhanced Edition if you've got the original set up just how you like it.

For console players, and those of us venturing into Skyrim's world for the first time, the game is a marked improvement on the original release, as you would expect from technology grinding on continually over the last five years. All of the DLC is included too, although I don't care much about that: I'm here to scale mountains and explore the caves, and with that as my sole goal, I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of Skyrim: Enhanced Edition, even if I've wholeheartedly missed the entire point, preferring instead the role of amateur cartographer, learning and mapping the many peaks, gullies and routes into my brain.