Did Skyrim age well? I sort of want to play it but don't really enjoy clunky older games. I think I would have liked it if I played it when it came out, but I did not.
Its really hard to tell how much of the hype is just childhood nostalgia.
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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Skyrim is timeless when you include modding
I'd say it holds up extremely well, especially with mods, but your enjoyment will depend on what you look for in a game.
The sandbox and exploration elements are the best part of the game IMO, but if you don't care about that kind of thing, you might not like it.
The Imperials were seconds away from executing me for crossing a border. Fuck them.
Yup. I played an Argonian and still preferred the racist Stormcloaks. Unlike MAGA, they were all talk and didn't try to deport me or kill me.
Both Oblivion and Skyrim made me appreciate Morrowind more, where a nonhuman race was the majority for a change. They still treated non-Dunmer like shit, but ah well.
Stormcloaks are MAGA, Empire are liberals, Aldmeri Dominion are IDF
Maga aren't self aware
Is there "yes man" story line like it was in fallout new vegas?
No, it's an odd one because you can do pretty much every quest for both sides right up until the end, and then it just goes "pick one and kill the other".
Kind of robs the game of a satisfying conclusion, but at the same time is like real life in that there's very rarely a perfect choice. You could always abstain and not do it of course.
I sided with the filthy Imperials, mostly because I couldn't really think of any of them I hated, while Ulfric's second-in-command rubbed me up the wrong way.
Imperial was really the only way to go. The stormcloaks winning would only result in them being wiped out by the thalmor anyway. The imperials were bending the knee just enough to survive and maybe have a chance at freedom in the future.
Sadly no, and that's a real problem because as racist as the Stormcloaks are... They do seem to be the lesser evil given that the Empire is actively working with the Thalmor and will even force changes to major world religions just to appease them, and the Thalmor are far FAR more bigoted than the Stormcloaks, going full mask off on wanting to enslave anyone who they can't genocide away.
The Stormcloaks do not like foreigners in their country and if you're an Argonian or an Elf they REALLY don't like you.... But their main point, that the Thalmor want to criminalize their very culture and kill them are, is valid, if it wasn't then the Stormcloaks would be the clear villain.
I kinda wish the Thalmor weren't part of the plot, because the twist of the underdog rebel group being evil and the big scary empire being good is actually a genius subversion of expectation.
Edit: I want to underline the whole "The Empire bans aspects of major world religions because the Thalmor told them to." part, because I feel like it's easy to overlook that as a big detail. In real life, it's still fucked up, but at the end of the day "So what, customs change over time and it's not THAT big a deal."
But this is a Fantasy setting where the reason for the major religion being major is because you can literally prove it, and even go to the Nord afterlife and meet Talos, the guy they banned the worship of, and find he does live up to what the good book says about him.
Meaning it's less "Tone down the religion because aspects of your practices are offensive to elves", and more akin to "We will kill anyone who acknowledges the Law of Gravity."
A strange game. The only moral move is not to choose.
Not choosing is what the Thalmor want. Reading the notes in their embassy makes it clear that they want the war to drag on as long as possible since it weakens both the Empire and Skyrim, improving the Dominion's odds of victory in the next war. Any resolution to the civil war is less bad than allowing it to continue. There is no good option, just ones you can live with and ones you can't.
Removing the Thalmor would make Skyrim a much less nuanced game, it's better off for not having easy moral choices.
True, but it means that ultimately at the end of the day the Stormcloaks are the only rational choice. The Empire doesn't give a shit about Skyrim, only about appeasing the Thalmor, the fact that they do so reluctantly isn't good enough.
The Empire was content to cut my head off without a trial or even knowing my charges if any existed to begin with.
What bad do we see the Stormcloaks do exactly, a bit of racism? Running some Argonian/Dark Elf Ghettos? That's horrible and I won't deny that it is, but the people I see killing unjustly are the Empire, and they're largely doing it because someone's honoring Skyrim's Customs (Roggvir comes to mind) or because they happened to be in the proximity of the Stormcloaks.
Again, I hate apologizing for Ulfric, (Especially when I usually play a Khajit or a Bosmer meaning I'm a target of their bigotry) especially with how depressing, crazy, and bigoted Windhelm is (It's the biggest downer town in the whole game), but the only people I'm seeing actually take lives in the name of supremacey, are the Thalmor, and the Empire when it acts on behalf of the Thalmor.
Now if there were a "Yes-Man" option like New Vegas where I told the Empire to fuck off (btw, it's the Blades, people from the Empire, that tell you to kill Party Snacks at the end of the game, while the Greybeards, people of Skyrim, who acknowledge that's a horrible idea and will never forgive you if you even think about it), and told the Argonian Dock workers "You have nothing to lose but your chains my comrades!"
I'd take it everytime.
God even in my power-fantasy I'm a slave to Lesser Evilism. I hate everything.
While it's bad that the Empire basically outlawed a major deity due to losing so bad to the Thalmor, I still find them the correct choice to pick during the civil war questline due to them trying to work against the Thalmor and build up their strength for a counterattack, so to speak.
What the Thalmor wants in game is for the civil war to drag on and be a drain on the Empire's resources, however a Stormcloak victory is also acceptable to them due to Ulfric being a useful idiot and that the Empire's power would wane and be easier to conquer later (y'know, divide and conquer).
And Legate Rikka, one of the higher ranking members of the Legion, worships Talos and prays over Ulfric's body when you kill him. So it's more of a case of banning Talos worship but not fully enforcing the law.
Yeah, the Empire really only enforces the ban while the Thalmor are looking. Elisif is another Talos worshiper and she's their choice for ruler of the province.
Most people out here would really shiver and die upon isekaing into any medieval nation, really.
It's a damn medieval game for Christ sake, people killed each other for much less back then.
The bigotry of low expectations
I've been saying that for a while. Nobody to root for in the game. Not the Empire, not the Stormcloaks, not even the Forsworn. And the Forsworn thing is a whole racist trope of its own, holy shit. You have basically this blackface take of Native Americans, who've been wrongfully dispossessed of The Reach, but they had to make them all black magic worshiping, centered around the witch/hag hierarchy, every weird colonialist slur you could even dig up from the "Manifest Destiny" days. Skyrim's great as like a fidget spinner for the ambience and the like, but man does it have problems.
It is just such an excessively mediocre game, that I'm still surprised to see people talking about playing it to this day. Just.. why?
why?
Eternal recurrence
"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!'
"Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?"
- Friedrich Nietzsche
I don't think you seriously know the lore of the Elder Scrolls and the way it usually works out, and are really projecting your own prejudices without realizing it. The Forsworn are a take on Breton mythology in The Elder Scrolls universe, and The Elder Scrolls universe is essentially all about subverting the expectation of what you thought the past really was like, what it truly was like, and the transposition of both of these into the same time frame. Hell, the whole concept of Aedra and Daedra may be a literal manifestation of this dichotomy at the "god/demon" level, "may be" because in true Elder Scrolls fashion the lore never tells you in an outright manner and just drops hints within the lore.
Neither the Empire or the Stormcloaks were supposed to be wholly good options, the player was supposed between distinctly flawed options, where siding with the Empire might very well have been the best in an imperfect world option. I suspect that the fact that the player base was as divided as they were between the two is why they went the complete opposite end of the spectrum in Starfiled and just slapped you with the "this is what you were supposed to choose!" companion commentary.
The more I hear about Starfield the more I'm glad Baldur's Gate 3 blew it out of the water.
The Forsworn thing is completely on the nose. I don't know what "take" you're saying it is.
You could go for the "they're telling you all options are imperfect" theory, except they dramatize the fuck out of the whole thing to make it seem as "epic" as possible (esp with the Stormcloaks). The same way the rest of the game is, that so oddly seems to coincidence with neo-Nazi Nordic idealism. I don't have prejudices about the game, it's a text with content and that's what the content is. I think real life is more black and white than the absolutely muddled amoral mess the Empire vs. Stormcloaks conflict is. Not to mention the constant implications about the sinister Aldmeri conspiracy that never seems to have any resonating significance in the plot.
The problem is Bethesda, as usual. Like with their work in Fallout, the script and the deeper meaning of any choices you make in the game are always subservient to their larger view of gameplay - they do not think of the player as a part of any story, they view their customer as a kid bashing action figures together. Any possible combination of action figures being bashed together needs to be valid in support of that. This is why every possible ally will accept you, and no choice ends up feeling like it deeply matters.
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