Skyrim: 5 Years Later

Five years ago, Bethesda Game Studios released a game that was critically acclaimed upon its launch. This game reached the top of the charts and was on every gamer’s Christmas list. This game’s name was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, an open-world role-playing game that forever changed the genre and gaming world as we knew it at the time.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Bethesda Game Studios announced a remastered version of this landmark game being released later this year that will no doubt please fans of the game on its release, but will hopefully draw in new players to the franchise. With Bethesda’s report of being “thrilled to announce that Skyrim Special Edition has gone gold,” meaning that the game is ready to be shipped to stores.

The original game started out its life in a promising way too, receiving scores like a 96 percent on Metacritic and a Nine out of Ten from GameSpot. The reasons for this are obvious upon playing the game with its sprawling, handcrafted open world that allows you to do what you want when you want. The gameplay was fun and easy to understand, which made the game accessible to new players, while still providing a challenge for veteran players of the Elder Scrolls series. Fans like Alex Koch, a Sophomore Mechanical Engineering major felt that, “It is good to see a game from five years ago still going strong and getting the attention it deserves. I really hope they will breathe new life into this game.”

The game was not without its faults in its initial release, though. The game was plagued with errors and glitches that could be as bad as ruining a player’s experience playing the game, or something as funny as a non player character behaving in an odd way. Despite these minor flaws, though, the game was still an uncontested success.

Despite plenty of excitement surrounding the game, there are still skeptics of the game. People like Nicholas Dela Cruz, a Sophomore Computer Science major thinks “that it will just be a little bit redundant to just remake the game … just to make it look better.” Many believe this but, the game isn’t just being improved graphically.

The remastered edition promises to do a lot to improve the base experience of Skyrim while retaining the same elements that gamers loved about the original. Because this release will be on the newest generation of game consoles though, the game’s graphics and framerate will be improved to facilitate a more immersive gameplay. What this means is that there will be less apparent pixels, or blurry areas, on the screen and that the game won’t jitter like a poorly-loaded Youtube video when it plays. These are both noteworthy improvements, however the big addition that has gamers excited is the addition of mod support.

To those unfamiliar with gaming, mods are user created content that can be downloaded and implemented into the game. For example, a weapon or armor that is not in the base game itself. The reason this is such a big deal for gamers is that this ability to modify the game was previously restricted to computer versions with the game. With Skyrim Special Edition, though, this ability is available to users of the console, Xbox or Playstation, versions of the game via an easy-to-use menu system.

With these improvements and optimizations, it is easy to see why gamers are excited to be able to visit Skyrim once again. Skyrim Special Edition is slated to release this October 28th and will be available on the Xbox One, Playstation 4, and PC platforms.