As The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bethesda Game Studios' latest iteration in its critically acclaimed fantasy-RPG series, appears on the giant movie screen in front of us, one fact makes the scene all the more poignant: the spectacular, sun-drenched vista laid out before us, filled with countless trees, rolling hills, a flowing river, and towering mountain ranges in all directions has been five years in the making.

“We actually started designing this game right after [The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion] in 2006,” Bethesda game director Todd Howard explained to us during our 45-minute Skyrim demo last week at Bethesda's BFG 2011 media event in Park City, Utah. “And we knew we wanted to do something that has a very different vibe than Oblivion. We wanted something more rugged. We immediately stuck with Skyrim and dragons.”



At that point in time, though, the team was heads down on its post-apocalyptic masterpiece Fallout 3, and wouldn’t come up for non-irradiated air until after the game shipped a couple years later.

“When we finished Fallout 3,” Howard continued, “we said, ‘Okay. It’s Elder Scrolls time again. We really miss this. We’re going to dive right in. Do we wait for a new console cycle? Because with Elder Scrolls, we like to start over.’ But we felt we had a really big laundry list of things we knew we could do on the current generation of consoles. Oblivion came out, and I think we had final hardware maybe four months for that game. So it feels like your freshman year of college, you know? Your like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on yet. Okay, I made it.’ We just felt there was so much we could do with current generation.”




That’s not to say that there wasn’t plenty of work to be done to get the systems in place to create the caliber of game that players expect from this period in the current-gen lifecycle. As Howard explained:
“We wrote the entire renderer. We have full shadows and everything now. We wrote all the pathing, the AI systems, the quest systems, the dialogue, the interface, the animation system. We’re using Havok Behavior, which is one of the most advanced animations systems out there. And by the time we were done, we had rewritten all the gameplay and all the graphics in our engine, enough that we’ve now branded it, the Creation Engine, and our editor, the Creation Kit.”

For PC mod lovers out there, you’ll be pleased to know that Bethesda is shooting to release its editor, aka the Creation Kit, day and date with Skyrim’s release. But, as Howard cautioned, “There might be some slack there.”

From here we jump into our gameplay walkthrough. An oddly peaceful organ chord hums underneath the picturesque setting. We start moving along the winding forest path, taking in the scenery. There’s a crispness to the surroundings that almost makes it seem as though you can smell the pine trees and feel the chilly winds blowing down the mountainside (but that might be because our character’s outfit doesn’t include sleeves). With the rush of the river hissing in the distance, and bugs buzzing nearby, Howard, tells us simply, “So, this is Skyrim.”



The region known as Skyrim is actually the northern most province of Tamriel, the fictional world where the Elder Scrolls takes place, and is the original home of humans. You’re probably wondering what our character’s backstory is at this point, and we’re sorry to inform you that Bethesda has intentionally left the protagonist’s origins a mystery. The game starts out with you being led to your execution for reasons unknown, and it’s up to you to fill in the blanks. Are you a criminal? Too kind and generous for your own good? You decide.

Unlike Fallout 3, which included a fairly extensive character creation system, Skyrim keeps things super simple. We didn’t get to see the actual menu, but we were told generally how it will work. You pick your gender, general appearance, and that’s pretty much it. You don’t assign points to your various abilities, because all of that is determined by how you play the game. Want to increase your sword skill? Use your sword more. Want to be able to cast a stronger fire spell? Use the fire spell. The game keeps track of all of your actions, which makes the RPG experience all the more satisfying and personal, since your actions are determining your abilities rather the other way around.

As we continue along the path, Howard takes a moment to admire a nearby flower, but only partly because it’s so beautifully rendered. He uses it to demonstrate the staggering breadth and ambition of the game's engine.

“A lot of engines are optimized not to draw things,” Howard explains. “We go into this knowing, we’re going to draw all of it. So we really messed with a lot of level of detail on things, lots and lots of streaming. This is where a lot of our particular technology comes into play, so we do deal with massive changes in scale, from this plant right here and the detail on that and all of the shadows to this mountain up there, which is real. You can walk to the top of that mountain, and the weather systems will go by it…So we’re just trying to fill this world with tons and tons of detail…we want to take you to another world.”

Howard switches to third-person to not only show off his character but more importantly to show off the game’s new Havok-based character animation system, which is instantly affecting as you see the character’s arm and neck muscles pulse realistically as he strolls with a rugged sense of purpose. The improvements made to the character movements and animations aren’t just cosmetic either.

“It behaves a lot better than you’ve had before as a third-person game. It’s going to compete with third-person games out there,” says Howard.

We continue along the forest-lined mountain path, with towering, snow capped/circled mountain ranges looming imposingly in the distance. When we reach the river’s edge, as if on cue, several fish leap upstream, trying to reach a higher portion of the river. Even though at this point we have only been living in the world of Skyrim for about four minutes, it is already abundantly clear that this a world percolating with life across all spectrums, from the smallest of planst to the massive dragons that we will encounter later on in the demo.




As Howard goes on to explain, we aren’t the only ones fascinated by Skyrim’s unmissable beauty.
“It’s kind of nice for our world artists coming off of Fallout 3 when I tell them, ‘Alright, you can use the green channel again.’ Believe it or not, we get into these kinds of things. There’s a certain beauty to it that you obviously don’t get in a game like Fallout. We like the downtime. We like the moments of watching the sunset and staring at the water.”

Howard then introduces us to the first-person control layout, which will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s played BioShock, as it places a weapon in your right hand and your spells (or a shield) in your left. Where Skyrim sets itself apart from Irrational Games’ beloved Plasmid-fueled dual-wielding is that you can actually put weapons or spells in both hands if you want. So if you’re a warrior, you can hold your shield in your left hand, and the left trigger will let you bash enemies with it, and hold a sword in your right, using the right trigger to hack and slash. Or if you want a warrior mage, hold a sword and put a spell in your other hand. Or if you want to go full wizard, you can put spells in both hands, so that when you pull both triggers, you unleash a doubly powerful version of the standard spell. As Howard explains, it’s “a really nice, slick kind of, mix and match, very elegant, very simple” system driven entirely “by what you put in your hands.”

Suddenly, strong, deep violin notes pull us from our sightseeing, and focus our attention further up the path where a foolish raider has decided he’s lived a rich and full life, and is now charging at us with his sword unsheathed. Time to put our newly learned combat skills to the test. When he gets within striking distance, Howard slashes him several times with his sword, causing blood to splatter on the ground and across his blade. The raider gets in a few slashes of his own, knocking our hero back. To give ourselves some space, we bash the fool with our shield before hitting him another wicked sword strike, which puts him down for good.

“Combat plays a big role in the game,” Howard continues. “It’s a lot more visceral in the way you bash and knock guys around. We did a lot of [pre-visualization] for what a fight should look like when you have a sword and shield, and when guys are really trying to kill one another.”



Further along, another raider attacks. This time, Howard demonstrates one of his spells, Frostbite, which coats the enemy in ice, slowing them down and chipping away health in the process. This buys our character precious time to deal some deadly damage, and to pull off one of the game’s new finishing moves. In this case, our character grabs the enemy’s shoulder and pulls him in close and runs him through with his sword with a sickeningly squishy crunch. While you'll be able to trigger these finishing moves fairly regularly, depending on how the enemy is position and if you've dealt a power attack, Skyrim won’t feature anywhere near the level of violence seen in Fallout 3. Although, the team is debating about whether to include dismemberment, so there's still time.

Continuing along the path, we reach our first destination, the logging town of Riverwood. And here ends part one of our first look preview of Skyrim. Check our part two where we take a look at Skyrim’s new interface and skill system, character interaction, town economies, quest givers, and, yes, dragons.

Bethesda Game Studio recently gave us a 45-minute gameplay walkthrough of its eagerly awaited The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim at Bethesda’s annual BFG event. In part one of our preview, we introduced you to the world of Skyrim, how the new combat system works, and some of the development back story that led to the game's creation. For part two, we will dive into town economies, quests, inventory management, and, yes, dragons.




After dispatching a few sorely outmatched raiders along a stunning forest path, Todd Howard, Bethesda game director and our demo driver, takes a moment to run us through the game’s new inventory system. Pressing the B button pulls up four menu options: skills, magic, inventory, and map. What’s rather neat is that each category is mapped to a different direction.

So when you select map, which is down, your character looks down, since the ground represents the path on the map. The map itself is a fully 3D map of the world that you can fly over and zoom into and out of to your heart’s content. What’s particularly impressive about the map is that it’s just the game world with the camera zoomed out above it.

Moving right moves your head right, since that’s where your weapons and useable items are held. When you bring up your inventory, you’re able to flip and rotate each item using the thumbsticks, which, as Howard says, makes finding a new item, “joyful on a visual level and not just, ‘Oh, this is a plus one.’”

“It’s not just an item with a number. You can look at all the items. They’re all fully modeled in 3D. You can zoom in. How is this thing made? What culture is this from?” Howard demonstrates this by bringing up a highly detailed shield and turning it over in space to show off its leather bindings, etchings, and contours.

Looking left brings up magic, and here we get to see how you’re able to set favorites, “like you bookmark webpages,” Howard explains. The spells that you favorite then appear on a quick menu brought up using the D-pad. The spells have also been modeled, so you can actually see them bubbling with energy while you examine their properties.

And looking up towards the heavens lets you look at your skills, since the gods are responsible for anointing you with your powers. The skill management screen is as brilliant conceptually as it is practically. Basically, the menu is comprised of a series of constellations with each constellation made up of a certain number of stars that represent perks associated with that skill. You get to select a perk each time you level up, just like Fallout 3. Beneath the constellations are bars that show you how that skill is progressing. All of your skills influence your leveling; the higher the skill, the faster you will level up.



Continuing on our way we enter Riverwood, a logging town perched next to a ragging river that is one of the first you encounter in the game. Moving into town we overhear a conversation between two townsfolk, over which we can hear a smith pounding an anvil with a hammer. Thanks to the game’s new radiant AI system, everything you see characters doing in the world, you can do as well. So if we want to repair items, we would be able to use the smith’s workbench to do so. Same for the man chopping wood nearby. Not sure about the man using a steel hook to toss giant logs onto a sawing board.

Additionally, each town produces a particular good or number of goods, in this case lumber. Should we sabotage the lumber production, it will affect the town’s economy. The team is still toying with exactly how this will play out gameplay wise, but the goal is to have your actions play a noticable role, whatever shape that might take. Generally, though, giving townsfolk, and your character, stuff to do is also just another way of making the world feel believable and making it seem like people actually live there.

We run into a woman on the edge of town who makes a comment about a local shopkeeper who was robbed recently. A message appears telling us we now have a miscellaneous objective to talk to the shopkeeper. These types of objectives aren’t as robust as full quests, but they can lead to much more substantial quests depending on the circumstances surrounding them. This is one of the key components of the game’s radiant story system, as it will push you towards quests and locations according to your actions and progress in the game.

Talking to the shopkeeper in his cozy, fireplace lit shop gives us our first look at the new dialogue system, which no longer keeps your character locked in place while you chat, but rather lets you move around freely during conversations. It’s a much more natural system than that seen in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3, which put the NPC squarely in the center of the screen for the duration of the interaction.

Through our conversation, we find out that thieves stole a particularly valuable object from the shop, a golden dragon’s claw. The owner offers us some sweet coin if we retrieve it, which serves a dual purpose, since the man’s sister was threatening to go looking for the claw herself, but because he was able to pass it off on me, she can stay put. Still, the woman insists that we need a guide out of town to point us in the right direction of our objective, Bleak Falls Barrow.

As the woman leads us out of town, we get to see/hear the retooled “walk and talk” design, which will let players control how little or how much peripheral information about the world/quest/characters/etc. they want to ingest, since at any point during this little stroll out of town, the player is free to run ahead and get to the questing. However, if you want to soak up some local flavor and get some more insight into the situation you’ve found yourself in, you can take it easy and listen to the NPC’s story. Howard listens for a little bit just to drive the point home, before sprinting out of the town limits in the direction of the foreboding mountain ahead of us. Fun fact: this particular mountain is known as the Throat of the World and is the tallest mountain in Tamriel. And over the course of the game, you will eventually travel the 7,000 steps to its top. Better start stretching those calves now.




One of the most surprising “Whoa!” moments for me came as a few seconds after starting our ascent up the mountain path when a towering troll came lumbering around the bend. The sheer unexpectedness mixed with his total disinterest in us made for a joyfully surprising little moment, and I’m looking forward to experience plenty more throughout the game since, as Howard assured us, the world is filled with creatures and characters who aren’t solely out to rip you’re your head.

Continuing up the steep mountain side, Skyrim’s impressive dynamic weather systems start to kick in, as warm, sunny skies are replaced ever so gradually by snow flakes and clouds. Howard stops along the path to bring our attention to a giant rock, which is lightly dusted with snow. As he explains, that snow collecting on the rock is all procedural, meaning that instead of having to build that rock with varying degrees of snow piled on it and then swapping it out in timed intervals to simulate it being covered in snow, the rock is built once and the engine determines how much snow should be on it and where it should fall.

Out of nowhere, a Frost Troll, a massive, white-haired beast charges at us. We’re able to make short work of it thanks to our fire spell. The spell actually causes the gnarly creature to be bathed in flames, before we finish it off with a few large swipes with our broadsword. Further along the path, a tall, stone tower peaks out through the snow. We use our Detect Life spell to highlight the guards standing in front of the tower, which gives us skill points in the process. We then swap to an illusion spell, which turns enemies against each other, and hit one of the guards with it, causing him to attack a nearby enemy.
In the chaos, we switch to our longbow, which can’t be used in conjunction with spells since it’s a two-handed weapon. Thanks to a couple of perks, we’re able to zoom in to line up a better shot on the guards and hold our breathe to steady our aim. The arrows sail and arc realistically and even stick firmly into enemies wherever they hit. After a few choice shots, the guards have been disposed of, and we continue further up the mountain.



We finally reach Bleak Falls Barrow, a massive, ancient temple built by the nords. It was built to honor dragons, which is signficant since dragons have been dormant for thousands of years but have recently and unexplainably awakened. Perfectly on cue, we hear a terrifying roar overhead. We look up, and get our first glimpse of the fire-breathing death bringer circling above. As we move closer to the temple, the dragon swoops in and crashes onto the stairs in front of us with tremendous force and with a startlingly fluidity that makes the beast the most convincing dragon I think I've ever seen in a game.

The beast spits fire at us in a fierce stream, but there’s something slightly strange about the fire breathing, primarily that the dragon uses actual words to generate the fire, a factor that plays in heavily to Skyrim’s overall story, since your character will, over the course of the game, come to learn various “dragon shouts,” which are words and phrases that can be used to generate powerful attacks of varying degrees depending on how long you charge the attack, i.e. how many words of the phrase you use. If you use the whole phrase, you’ll have to wait longer for it to recharge, which introduces a nice bit of strategy to the whole system. But more on that in a little bit.

In the interest of keeping the demo moving, Howard sprints for the temple’s door, avoiding a full out battle with the dragon towering over us, and bringing part two of our first look at Skyrim to a dramatic close. Check back tomorrow for part three to see what bounties, foes, and challenges await us in our first dungeon crawl. We’ll also take a deeper look at dragon shouts, radiant questing, and dragon battles. Glorious, glorious dragon battles.

So for the final act of our 45-minute BFG 2011 demonstration, Bethesda Game Studio’s director Todd Howard brings us into our first dungeon, a dark, grimy, wet, stony space literally dripping with detail and shafts of light pouring through the walls. As we move further inside, the flicker of firelight is seen up ahead. From our hiding place in the shadows, we spot a man and a woman talking around the fire. To better help players understand how stealthy they are being, the game now uses an eye icon to tell you how exposed you are, and since all of the shadows in the game are now dynamically rendered, this promises to be a much appreciated feature.

From the shadows, we draw back our bow and fire, taking out the man. “I know I heard something,” says the woman as the man collapses, in one of the demo’s less than on point moments. The woman charges, and we dispatch her with a few choice bolt shots as well. There’s something important worth pointing out about this encounter, since it perfectly demonstrates how the game’s radiant story system factors into every corner of the world.

VIDEO PREVIEW: Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Gameplay Preview
Like countless quests and miscellaneous objectives in Skyrim, this particular one—find the golden claw that was stolen from a shopkeeper back in the town of Riverwood—could have been stumbled upon simply by chance. Had you found this temple in your open-world wanderings, you would have encountered these two folks talking and been able to eavesdrop on their conversation, which would have prompted the same “Find the golden claw” objective that you were assigned by speaking to the shopkeep back in town. There were similar instances in Fallout 3, but in Skyrim, they will be much more expansive and dynamic, and will help make each players experience that much more unique.



A similar instance occurs in the next portion of the dungeon where we stumble upon another treasure seeker who had broken off from his two pals (the two we just killed) in search of the claw. In our haste, we actually interrupted him before he could try his hand at solving a puzzle standing between us and the next room. Had we not interrupted him, he would have tried to solve the puzzle, and been welcomed with a barrage of darts that would have killed him, providing us with a valuable lesson in how to avoid being killed by a dart barrage. For the sake of the demo, Howard simply solved the puzzle, which entailed turning a series of statues to match the pattern laid out by symbols around the room, and we moved ahead.

We pick up a soul gem here, which can be used to power up spells or create new ones. We didn’t get to see how this actually plays out, so sorry magic lovers. You’ll have to wait a little bit longer to find out more about this particular feature. However, we did get to see a rather nifty spell called Front Rune, which lets you set explosive ice traps on the ground that are triggered when enemies pass over them.

In order to move into the next room, Howard hacks away at a thick cobweb blocking the path, an ominous obstacle indeed. As we enter the room, a giant spider descends from above the center of the room, in a clear homage to The Lord of the Rings. Through a combination of frost traps and powerful sword swipes, the spider crumples into a spindly mass.



A man calls to us from a nearby wall where he has been encased in cobwebs. He promises to explain what the golden claw is and how it unlocks the next room if we cut him down. We take a few swipes at the web until he falls free. In classic “Throw me the idol! I throw you the whip!” fashion, as soon as he is free, he breaks into a run. Before he can get too far, we pull out our bow and use our focus and zoom perks to put an arrow square into the fleeing cowards back. Exploring his corpse nets us some goodies, particularly the dead man’s journal and the golden claw. The journal is just one of the countless books you’ll find in the world, and you’ll be able to flip through and read them to find hints, clues, quest info, and general info that will further fill out the overall Skyrim narrative.

The next area introduces us to Draugr Skeletons soldiers. As they rise out of their crypt beds and close in, we unleash our chain lightning spell, which zaps a number of soldiers at once, and cast a circle of protection to keep the enemies at bay long enough to take out the stragglers.

We continue onward and enter into a stunning cave system complete with a flowing stream and waterfalls pouring in from all sides. Howard shoots a fireball that flies through the cave, beautifully lighting the cave as it floats hundreds of feet into the distance. At the far end, a bright shaft of light leads the way to another draugr encounter. One dude gets an axe to the skull (which creates a sickening crunch sound) and the others get treated to a mix of fire spells and explosive lamps.



Finally, we reach the Hall of Stories, a shrine of sorts where the ancient nords would place fallen comrades as the first step on their journey to the afterlife. To gain entrance, we have to arrange three symbols by spinning three concentric stone circles attached to the door. There’s an imprint in the center ring for what looks like pointed fingertips. The claw! Here, the game’s inventory system become a tool for solving this puzzle, since every item in the world has been crafted down to the smallest detail and can be examined thoroughly in the inventory management menu. When we spin the claw around, we notice three symbols emblazoned on the underside of it. Armed with this new info, we crack the code and enter.

As we step into the towering stone chamber, a small colony of bats rushes past as water pours into the room via various openings in the walls and ceiling. Ahead of us stands a curved rock wall (the appropriately named, Word Wall) with ancient “words of power” carved into it. When you combine three of these words, of which there are around 60 at this point, you create a dragon shout, a powerful, voice-driven attack that will feature prominently in the game’s combat as well as overall story. In our brief dragon encounter prior to entering this dungeon, we actually saw one of these shouts in action, since, as Howard explained, when the dragons breathe fire, they are actually speaking.

Howard demonstrates one of the first shouts you learn in the game, unrelenting shout, which sends out a blast wave that will simply stagger enemies if you only use the first word (i.e. tap the right bumper) or blast them through the air if you charge up and shout the whole phrase. The one we just learned lets us slow down time, which comes in quite handy as just then, a floating Dragon Priest appears and summons an imposing Frost Atronoch to do his cowardly bidding. Howard uses the slow time shout to buy us precious seconds to dispense with the frozen beast with our fire spell before turning our attention, aka our axe, on the floating dragon priest, who quickly falls.

We exit the temple onto an arresting lakefront view. Our serene sightseeing doesn’t last long, as another pesky dragon roars and soars overhead before landing in a clearing just ahead of us. Howard once again uses slow time to get in some solid sword swipes at the beast’s frighteningly close face, which causes the dragon to swoop back into the air to regroup. The dragon’s fluidity of movement and physical construction are as spectacular as they are terrifying. Howard then hits the dragon with a spell, which apparently caused enough damage to cause the dragon to fall out of the sky and then skid along the ground, further driving home the sheer weight of the creature. It regains its composure and begins walking after us with giant strides, spitting fire the whole way. Finally, we unleash a devastating electricity spell that puts the dragon down for good.

When we approach the fallen dragon, the corpse begins to glow. Because the player character is known as “dragon born,” he is capable of “devouring” the souls of dragons. Bethesda has yet to reveal exactly what this will factor into the game (and no, it’s not going to allow you to call in dragon mounts, although Howard hinted that there would be something “on the edge of that”), but expect to hear plenty more at E3 2011. With the dragon’s orange-tinged soul swirling around our character and the bass rattling the room around us, the scene fades out and the Skyrim logo fades up, bringing our demo, and our three-part first look, to a sad, sad end