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"Accompanied by strange circumstances, visions and dreams you get involved in a mystical conflict whose roots may be found in Enderal. "You, a fugitive from Nehrim, find yourself aboard a ship heading for Enderal," explains the mod's website. The team estimates it could occupy you for 30 to 150 hours. It uses the same engine for Skyrim and was built with the official toolset but otherwise it's an entirely new game. It's like they're a person for whom you get to make any life choice you can.Enderal is a total-conversion mod. Your character in Skyrim isn't just about the combat, gameplay, or even story. That lets me join a guild of warriors, mages, assassins or thieves. It's a game that lets me pick a husband or wife. It's a game that lets me buy a home in a city where I've helped the populace. It's not just a game where I blast dragons with fireballs, stealthily slay necromancers, or charge headlong into epic warfare. Skyrim is a living, breathing society that exists on my hard drive or game disc, and it invites me to join it. The game, Skyrim, isn't named after a character or concept or theme. The other half of this immersion is setting. That choice allows you to personify the character, rather than just direct him, and personifying that character, even if he and I are dissimilar in every way, is an incredibly rewarding immersive experience. Bethesda gives you a game (and more importantly a character) that gives you control, as all games do, but also gives you choice. This is the magic of Skyrim, the reason it's on everyone's lips, the reason it's made so much money, and the reason I've spent days playing it. The immersion here is twofold: You have the drive to complete the objective, as you control all actions of the protagonist, but you also have the ability to decide which objectives are worth completing and which aren't. In fact, the game has so many, that blindly answering "yes" is daunting, leaving you with a journal of unfulfilled objectives. Bethesda literally gives us the choice between "I'll help you" and "I don't have the time."Įvery quest is deniable. We have not one, but two chances to leave this potential quest behind. Even quests like "Save the world, please" can be answered with a flippant "I got some important stuff to work on, maybe later." But with a deeper look, it's actually an ingenious way to immerse the player. A supporting character will complain about a problem they can't fix, you ask them for more information, which they give, then you either agree to fix the problem or not.Īt first, this can be strangely frustrating, as no one ever flat out tells you to do anything. The thing is, immersion doesn't end there for Bethesda and Skyrim.Įvery quest in Skyrim is introduced the same way. A bad story or bad gameplay will take us out of it, in the same way that a bad story will in any other media. The developers bank on this alignment to get them to finish the game. Games align the player and the protagonist, such that when a supporting character tells Master Chief or Commander Shepard to complete an objective, the player is motivated to complete it. Because they're directly goal-oriented (in that your actions are required for the plot to move forward) immersion isn't nearly as difficult a concept to achieve. Games, however, look at immersion differently. The audience of a movie, for instance, has no say in how the story will progress, so the director has to have something immersive about it to keep the audience invested in something they have no agency in. The story or the world generally does the immersing and it's viewed as a tool to get the reader or viewer to keep reading or watching. Well, before we go into that, let's set some ground rules. So, what is it about the Bethesda method that's so gripping? My playtimes on Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Oblivion (all games by Bethesda, the same developer) are all similar. It's not the first video game I've ever been immersed so deeply in.
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I'm pretty sure I haven't racked hours like these since World of Warcraft, but the bigger point is that I have racked hours like these.Īnd the question is why. That's a little over four days (out of the last 19 it's been out) that I've spent playing the game. My playtime in The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is ninety-nine hours, five minutes, and fifty five seconds. See, there are dozens, hundreds of reviews of Skyrim put out by journalists more intelligent and trustworthy than I.Īnd all I'm going to say is that the game is amazing, you should buy it, and it'll be your favorite game faster than you can say Modern Warfare. I wanted to write a review of Skyrim, but then I realized that it wasn't a great use of my time.