The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Overview

A cart rattles toward an execution. The prisoners in it include a rebel leader and the player, and as the headsman raises his axe, a black Dragon lands on the tower above and burns the town. Dragons, gone from the world for millennia, have returned, led by Alduin the World-Eater. The player turns out to be Dragonborn, a mortal with a dragon's soul, able to devour the souls of slain dragons and speak their language as shouts that knock enemies flat.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, developed by Bethesda Game Studios and released on November 11, 2011, for Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, is set two centuries after Oblivion in Tamriel's northernmost province, a land of pine forests, tundra and snowbound peaks caught in a civil war between Imperial loyalists and Stormcloak rebels. It is also, like its predecessors, a game that lets the player ignore all of that. It shipped 7 million copies in its first week, sold more than 60 million by 2023, and has been re-released so many times that its ubiquity became a joke Bethesda tells on itself.

Origins

While Bethesda Game Studios was making Fallout 3, Todd Howard's team began planning the next Elder Scrolls game, and decided from the start on the province of Skyrim and on dragons. Full development began after Fallout 3 shipped in 2008, with a team of roughly 100. Howard wanted to recapture the sense of discovery of Morrowind's alien world, which he felt Oblivion's generic European fantasy had sacrificed; art director Matthew Carofano called the result "epic realism." Skyrim was divided into nine holds, each with its own terrain and economy, and was built by hand rather than with Oblivion's generated landscapes. Where one person had designed Oblivion's dungeons, a group of eight built Skyrim's 150. The game has 244 quests and more than 300 marked locations.

The new Creation Engine, forked from Fallout 3's technology, brought longer draw distances, dynamic shadows, trees whose branches moved with weight in the wind, and conversations in which characters kept moving instead of freezing. Concept artist Adam Adamowicz created the Dragon language and a runic alphabet for it, and Jeremy Soule's theme, "Dragonborn," set that language for a choir, the Elder Scrolls theme reimagined, as Howard put it, as sung by barbarians. The cast of more than 70 voice actors included Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer and Joan Allen. Howard revealed the game at the Spike Video Game Awards on December 11, 2010, with its date in the trailer: 11–11–11.

How it plays

Skyrim drops character classes entirely. The player picks one of ten races and simply acts: every skill, from one-handed weapons and destruction magic to smithing, lockpicking and speech, improves with use, and each skill has a tree of perks that deepen a chosen style. Either hand can hold a weapon, shield or spell, so a character might fight with sword and flame at once. Dragon shouts, learned from words carved on ancient walls and powered by dragon souls, add a third tool.

Beyond the main quest lie the Companions, a mercenary guild with a werewolf secret; the College of Winterhold; the Thieves Guild in the ratty city of Riften; the Dark Brotherhood; the civil war; and hundreds of other quests, many generated on the fly by the "Radiant" story system. Characters farm, mill and mine; players cook, craft, marry and, after the Hearthfire add-on, build houses and adopt children.

Reception & impact

Critics praised the world, the art direction, the freedom of the perk system and dual-wielding. They criticized the melee combat, predictable dragon behavior and bugs, some game-breaking, particularly on PlayStation 3, where large save files caused slowdown. Famitsu gave it a perfect 40 out of 40, the first Western game to earn that score. It won Game of the Year from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, Spike TV, GameSpot, Giant Bomb and many others, and PC Gamer later ranked it first among the greatest PC games of all time.

The sales were enormous: 3.4 million physical copies in two days, 7 million shipped in a week, 10 million and about $620 million by December 2011, and 20 million by June 2013. On PC it was, Valve said, the fastest-selling game Steam had yet seen. The Creation Kit, released to players in 2012, made Skyrim a modding platform: fans fixed bugs, rebuilt its graphics, added new lands and whole total conversions such as Enderal, and several modders were hired into the industry. Its memes, "Fus Ro Dah" and the guard who "took an arrow in the knee," passed into general internet culture.

Legacy

Three add-ons followed in 2012: Dawnguard, about vampires and their hunters; Hearthfire; and Dragonborn, which returned to the island of Solstheim from Morrowind. Then came the re-releases: the Special Edition remaster (2016), versions for Nintendo Switch and virtual reality (2017), the Anniversary Edition (2021) and a Switch 2 version (2025), with Howard saying in 2023 that it had sold over 60 million copies. Bethesda joked about its own habit at E3 2018 with Skyrim: Very Special Edition for Amazon Alexa. Developers have credited it as an influence on games from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to Valheim, and on the open-world direction of The Witcher and Dragon Age series; Hidetaka Miyazaki named the Elder Scrolls games among the inspirations for Elden Ring. The Elder Scrolls Online let players revisit Skyrim's holds online, and fans are still waiting for The Elder Scrolls VI, announced in 2018.