In case you’ve been living under a rock on Mars with your fingers in your ears, Skyrim came out today. Skyrim is the latest in the ever-more-popular Elder Scrolls series, whose most basic principle is to present you with an open world and set you loose to do mostly as you please. I never played the first two, but the third one – Morrowind – because a game I love fiercely and which is deeply ingrained in my memory as an all-time classic. It wasn’t actually tremendously good in pure gameplay terms. It was just so vast, so expansive, so atmospheric and alien, so unapologetically ambitious, that its flaws were irrelevant, indeed they became charms at times.

TES IV, Oblivion, was another matter. The fighting was much improved, true, but everything else just seemed to be lacking. The better graphics were only applied to a very generic fantasy world; the portals to Oblivion were impressive at first but quickly became repetitive and tedious to explore, and presented anyway no sense of danger to the world. It was just a hollow game, and even with mods (barring Nehrim) it never became something I spent a huge amount of time with.

Here, then, is Skyrim. At first I was leery of what they were saying about it. Better AI? Better questing? Hah, okay, and I’m the Pope (Outside of Europa Universalis III, I mean). Only… that stuff does seem to be true, so far. Melee combat is much as it was in Oblivion, if a good bit more polished, but the alternatives, namely magic and archery, are truly brilliant. The interface, on the 360 at least, is slick and polished. I hear bad things about the PC’s UI though. I was worried about the simplification of skills, such as removing acrobatics and athletics (And I do still dislike that) but what is there is great, primarily because of the new perk system. Every level you get one point that you can put into getting some significant bonus in a given skill tree. I first chose, for instance, to halve the cost of my novice-level Destruction spells, and this made a tremendous difference to how I was going about fights.

What I’m finding is that I want to tell you not just about how I came upon some bandits, killed one, resurrected her as a zombie, and let her fight her former comrades while I burnt them from afar; I also want to tell you about how I found a treasure map on one of their bodies, and it was just the right amount of detail to show me where to look without being too easy. I want to tell you about how I walked into a store during an argument, asked about it, said I could help retrieve something, and this was reacted to in a natural way – they kept arguing, but the topic shifted slightly. I want to tell you about how I scarfed down a whole load of random ingredients to learn their alchemical effects, only to find I had crippled my stamina for a moment. I don’t just want to explain fighting mechanics, I want to relate stories to you, stories that I experienced in this world. And it is a world, and that is the magic of it. I ascended a fairly small mountain and as it grew stormier and snowier, I felt physically colder in my room. That’s when I decided I had enough to make a preliminary blog post on the game.

All this from two hours of play.

Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Alec Meer not only called Skyrim GOTY, but said “I’m sorry Morrowind – I love you, but I don’t need you anymore. I think, at last, there is a new Best Elder Scrolls Ever.” This is high praise indeed.

It’s very early for me to make any serious judgment on this game. But he might be right.

Also, Saul Tigh voices one of the characters. I am MORE than okay with this. Will someone turn off that DAMN MUSIC?