How To Create A House In Skyrim

Skyrim is so much more than a sandbox

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Hailing as I do from the Pacific Northwest, I've never witnessed truly extreme weather. Both that part of the US and New York, where I now live, sometimes get some heavy rain, snow, and high temperatures, but they're usually occasional and sensible. So you can imagine my shock last week when I encountered an actual whiteout. Until that point, I'd always considered this condition mythical, at least outside far-flung climes like Alaska and Russia. But there I was, trudging through what seemed like a perfectly ordinary snowfall, when suddenly I was caught in a furious blizzard. I tried to press on, but the snow was falling so quickly on a landscape already piled high with it that almost instantly I lost my ability to discern any difference between the ground I was standing on and the space in front of me. It was, simply put, terrifying.

I guess I'm lucky this was in a video game, huh?

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim marks the latest installment in one of gaming's more ambitious series, which I've been following since its 1994 debut with The Elder Scrolls: Arena. Since that beginning, Bethesda Softworks' games have focused on enormous countries packed with more people, places, and quests than most sensible RPGs have dared include. And every major game since — Daggerfall (1996), Morrowind (2002), and Oblivion (2006) — has only gotten bigger and better, each new release making the continent of Tamriel as real as available technology allows.

For me, Skyrim represents yet another level of verisimilitude. Even aside from my woozy walk through a winter wonderland, I have never lost myself in a game the way I lost myself in this one. I started taking scenic routes to my destinations all the time, forgoing the "fast travel" option that would get me where I'm going in seconds rather than 20 minutes. I wanted to see, for example, whether a river tumbled down into a waterfall or collected into a lake. I became obsessed with the behavior of rabbits hopping across forest paths, or the way deer grazed in grassy patches. (The wolves were less fascinating — they just wanted to eat me.) When I trudged around a bend in the road and saw a city partially silhouetted against the dawn sky, I had to stand and watch as it slowly illuminated in the increasing early-morning light.

Skyrim Dragon Fight

This is not how I conduct either my gaming or my real life! I just didn't know how else to react to a series of wonders that only grew more detailed and remarkable the longer I played. Or, rather, "played." As much as I enjoyed the game's primary story — a power struggle is dividing the province into factions, weakening the land and its people in the face of an apparent resurgence in the presumed-extinct dragon population — I found myself ignoring it for hours merely so I could bask in this impossibly rich environment. Some of this might have to do with the fact that I've never been to Denmark, Norway, or Sweden, so the Scandinavian milieu (which informs the architecture — I loved the Gothic, cathedral-like keeps, thatched roofs, and plentiful flying buttresses — as much as the mountain-heavy terrain) affected me more than it might someone better traveled. But I honestly believe it was more that anything I wanted to do, anywhere I wanted to go, was a possibility this time as it had never been before.

Does this make Skyrim the ultimate sandbox game? I want to say yes, but I'm afraid it'll sound like I'm demeaning Bethesda's accomplishment by doing so. Sure, every once in a while something like Rage comes around, but its geography was relatively tiny, and it still shoehorned you into the linear roster of quests the programmers outlined. Then there's Crysis 2, which I liked, but it was more "sandbox lite," with open levels that didn't link to each other in any cohesive, manageable way. With the Elder Scrolls games, you've never had to follow the main plot if you haven't wanted to, and only the passage of time (sorry, in our world) stopped you from going anywhere and everywhere. This is unparalleled freedom.

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