The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is out for less than a week and, despite some early problems thanks to the clunky character creator, which still delivered a pretty robust set of customization options, I'm beginning to get more and more interested in it, but only because I can play it in a very special way.
I wasn't that interested in Skyrim before its release, mostly because I wasn't that big of a fan of the previous Elder Scrolls installment, Oblivion. Still, given the fact that I loved both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, I decided to give Bethesda the benefit of the doubt.
While at first I decided to go full warrior, like I did in other fantasy RPGs like Dragon Age, I quickly found the swordplay extremely unintuitive, largely because enemies would move pretty fast and your precious sword swings, which eat up Stamina, would miss quite often.
As such, I decided to experiment and found that the best way to play Skyrim, at least for me, is to act like you're in BioShock 2, and use both a weapon in one hand as well as a magic attack in the other.
As such, I chose a Breton character because they're pretty balanced and equipped a sword on my right hand and the flame attack on the other, after switching up the mouse button bindings, as opposed to my colleague, who wants a bit of
cognitive dissonance with his Skyrim experience.
After that, using this combo of flames for ranged combat and the sword if enemies got too close, I found that I was pretty much dominating combat, while having a much more pleasant experience than I would have when trying to just hit things with my sword.
So, while Skyrim may be a special experience for some, for me it's mostly like a BioShock game where Rapture has been replaced by a medieval fantasy setting.
Skyrim was released last week for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and we've already posted quite a few impressions of it, complete with
a quick look, a
one hour with the game, as well as a couple of entries in this
Gamer Diary series.
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