The Skyrim decade: How Bethesda’s dragon-slaying opus transformed gaming
Bethesda owns Skyrim, but it’s the fans and players who’ve made it their own
Games Features Creative works
A prisoner kneels before the headsman’s block, the executioner’s ax already crimson with a previous victim’s blood. Helpless, they lay their head down, preparing for the final blow to fall. But then a cry rings out, unearthly, horrifying, miraculous—an eldritch and irresistible “Oooooh yeah!” An Imperial general, all composure suddenly lost, spots something in the sky, and cries out in panic, “What in Oblivion is that?” But the player already knows, even before the winged, cowboy-hatted figure drops onto a nearby tower, flames pouring from his Slim Jim-snapping mouth: It is Macho Man Randy Savage, and he is here to end the world.
If this isn’t the iconic opening of Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim—which celebrates its landmark 10th anniversary today—it’s at least an iconic opening for the best-selling open-world role-playing game. Simultaneously a corporate money-printing engine, and one of the purest examples of player expression in gaming history, Skyrim stands over a decade that never seemed able to surpass or forget it—not least of which because Bethesda wouldn’t let people, resolutely shoving the game onto every platform imaginable, over and over again.
Even the company got in on the joke of its relentless and insatiable re-releasing, recording a video with Keegan-Michael Key in which he played a fake version of the game via Amazon’s Alexa—and, yes, there’s something fitting about the fact that even the studio’s jokes contain that potent seed of corporate cross-promotion.
But the Skyrim story is much more than just the nigh-endless wave of remasters and repackagings that Bethesda helped inspire. (The game’s Anniversary Edition, out today, is something like its sixth or seventh full version, expanding its life span across three full console generations; not even regularly regurgitated classics like The Last Of Us can quite match that.) It’s also the story of a community taking a game and transforming it into a digital playground—sometimes with the tacit support of the games’ corporate owners, and sometimes, not so much.
Which brings us back to Macho Dragon Randy Savage—or Dragon Thomas The Tank Engine, or Dragon Fighter Jets, or any of the other absurd, beautiful, and deadly replacements Skyrim’s modding community has applied to the game’s signature antagonists over the last 10 years. The dragons are Skyrim’s iconic creatures: loud, visually demanding, and technically impressive. Even more than the chilly landscapes, the Empire-Stormcloak war, or the player character, the shout-blasting Dovahkiin, the dragons represent Bethesda’s grand ambitions for the vast world its designers have breathed into life.
Is it any wonder, then, that they’ve been a frequent topic for modders, who’ve spent that same decade projecting their own creative desires, sometimes with the vandal’s gleeful eye, on to frosty northern Tamriel? “Macho Dragons,” by modder FancyPantz, hit NexusMods in January 2012, just two months after Skyrim’s release; “Really Useful Dragons,” the famed mod that transforms all of the game’s draconic villains into Thomas The Tank Engine characters, followed a year later.
These mods are goofy, dumb, sometimes outright broken. They are also, in their own way, Skyrim at its best, taking Bethesda’s base design philosophy of player freedom in an open world and blowing it out to determinedly meta levels. Base Skyrim asks if you’d like your Dovahkiin to be a warrior, a mage, or a stealthy archer; modded Skyrim asks if they’d like to be a Pokémon trainer, a fashion designer, or just, y’know, have sex with every single person in the small city of Whiterun. Truly, the sky’s the limit.
At the same time, there are those legions of modders who forego the flashy or the hornt, instead choosing to simply try to make Skyrim better. Bigger, prettier, more technically stable, more fun to play. Few games have ever employed a technical team more dedicated, or less compensated; if you have a problem with basically any aspect of Skyrim, rest assured that someone, somewhere, has thought of a possible fix, generally on a largely volunteer basis.
To Bethesda’s enduring credit—and profit—it’s always understood that modding adds immeasurable value to its games, extending the life of Skyrim by hundreds of hours and a literal decade of real-world time. (The company even pushed out some regulated mod support for the game’s console releases, a shocking rarity in the increasingly closed environments of modern consoles.) Even so, the company—now owned by Microsoft—has expressed clear discomfort at times with the fact that it doesn’t own the biggest selling point of its own magnum opus; hence, presumably, the occasional efforts to monetize, incorporate, or in other ways get a hand on the ball of Skyrim’s modding scene.
The most infamous of these incidents occurred roughly halfway through the game’s current life span, back in 2015. That’s when Bethesda announced a plan to begin allowing creators to officially charge for mods, dividing a cut with the company in the process. And while this strategy was quickly shouted down by a community that was already well into its life-long obsession with Skyrim, the company tried again a few years later with its Creation Club scheme, to some less-muted contempt. (The Anniversary Edition will include 500 or so pieces of Creation Club content. Also: fishing!)
It’s interesting, then, to note that Skyrim both predates, and presages, the most dominant gaming trend of the decade it looms over: games as service, the design/marketing philosophy that demands that games function as endless engines of income for their owners, hooking players up for regular drips of paid content and then getting them to play, basically, forever. (Destiny, which helped codify the movement, wouldn’t arrive until 2014.) In fact, you can see that trend, at least in part, as an effort to replicate the Skyrim effect—which has seen players return to the game over and over across the years, usually dropping new cash on it each time—without having to actually make Skyrim, a game so massively large as to be economically ludicrous by modern standards.
The legacy of Skyrim is therefore one of paradox: at once as thoroughly churned a wad of content as has ever been relentlessly masticated by this industry, while simultaneously a source and inspiration for soaring heights of creativity. (It’s not for nothing that The Forgotten City, one of the best games of 2021, got its start as a Skyrim mod.) Its merits as a game—considerable, if mixed, even a decade on—pale behind its status as a platform, something it achieved years before that sort of thing became the goal of every publisher with dollar signs and dreams of metaverse nonsense dancing in their eyes.
It is, and was, a game so profitable that it inspired new and grim endeavors in the profit-seeking sciences; it is, and was, a game so purely vast that it inspired its players to build whole new horizons for themselves. (Members of the community are currently worrying that Anniversary Edition’s updates might potentially wreck years of technical scaffolding on god knows how many mods; it’s hard to imagine they won’t find a way to reclaim what is now very much their game, in the end.) The past decade does not so much reflect it as stand in reaction to it. Why build another Skyrim, the logic seems to run, when Skyrim already exists—and, apparently, always will?
43 Comments
“Few games have ever employed a technical team more dedicated, or less compensated”Roblox would like to have a word with you.
That would be one of the few, then.
Ummm the Alexa version of Skyrim is not fake, it was still playable on Alexa when I checked back in July. Try it yourself! Tell any Alexa you want to play Skyrim.
Skyrim would have to beat SimCity 4’s record. 17 years later and its modding community is still going and going strong cranking out new buildings and mods despite it being very outdated visually and technically, zero support from EA who refuse to release the source code to the public, and have gone after modders who’ve tried to.
Of course the darker side of this is that Bethesda releases buggy, poorly-optimised, often completely broken games with poor UIs, terrible writing, bad voice acting, and underneath it all a creaking engine at least a decade out of date.But mods fix it, so it’s ok! (unless you play it on a console)
Playing it shortly after it came out, I remember being blown away by the open worldiness in a way that nothing since has ever quite matched. I had just moved to a big city with traffic fuming by outside my window, and booting up Skyrim to tramp across the meadows and mountains really felt like playing Fresh Air Simulator 2011 (NB: not medically approved).
I generally made a roleplaying rule of leaving NPCs alive, but as my final act in my playthrough I did go back to Whiterun and brutally shank Nazeem, the true nemesis of the game. But in death, he was proven right: since then, I genuinely haven’t made it back to the Cloud District very often.
In every iteration of the game I’ve played, no matter how good my character, I have patiently staked out a spot out of view of the guards and sniped the shit out of the raving priest in Whiterun.
He truly is the right-wing talk radio of Skyrim.
“Do the elves take your homes? Your businesses? Your children? Your very lives? Let’s go Brandon! We’re gonna take some callers.”
Not even Inigo could stand him:
That guy is infinitely more obnoxious than Nazeem.
Huh. I just gave him musical accompaniment.
“Oh, how I LOVE YOU!” yea. That guy’s gotta go, so annoying!
I don’t even have an active game going now; I just take my most recent character, the main quest done, level 80+, dig him out of his happy retirement cabin in the wilderness, and have him take a lap around the map, stopping wherever is interesting. And then suddenly it’s three months later real time, and I’ve been playing this game, aimlessly wandering and just soaking it in, longer than I play most games through on their main questline. It’s a capital-A Achievement. I may have played better games, but none gives me an experience like this. So many memories: seeing ruins far off in the mountains and then realizing I could actually go to them instead of them being there as scenery. Seeing Solitude for the first time, at sunset as I climbed the hill and arrived at the port. A trio of giants clubbing a dragon to death after it had torched a mammoth. The smith in Riverwood, going back to his house and mourning his wife after she was randomly killed in a dragon attack. The assistant smith taking over the forge after the Whiterun smith was killed by vampires, and complaining that he’s not as good as she was. Stumbling on Blackreach purely by accident and realizing how huge it was, and it’s not even all that integral to the game. I love the Fallout games, but after a while you just need a break from that bleak, blasted landscape. Here, they added beauty in, and it’s genuinely a world I get lost in and miss when I finally wind down and put it away for a while.
All of this. It really is just an amazing, fully realized world that is so easy to return to and something I haven’t found elsewhere (I hoped for a similar experience from Breath of the Wild, but no matter how beautiful that game is, it just feels flat to me compared to the world of Skyrim). I’ve been considering deleting my 300+ hour save and starting a new play through…for the third time I think…so I guess its a great opportunity to upgrade to the anniversary edition.
I can understand the way you feel about the Fallout games in terms of setting. Of all the Fallout games, New Vegas was probably the one I enjoyed exploring the most. It’s still devastated by the scars of nuclear war and the ongoing war with the NCR vs. the Legion, but there are some sights that are a bit easier to look at. The Hoover Dam is a nice bit of scenery, and I do like seeing the lights of New Vegas. The DLC Honest Hearts has some beautiful scenery via Zion Canyon, as it isn’t as ravaged as other parts of the Mojave. You get some really great views from the ranger stations.
The best thing about Skyrim is the charm IMO. The NPCs and the bugs that make the game funny and endearing. The random, lowly bandit that screams “You never should have come here!” while making a mean face at you, then casually summons bread from thin air and starts eating. The inheritance letter and gold you receive from a random enemy you killed long ago who evidently thought enough of you to leave you money. The guard who laments on how there’s not enough adventure around here, while the town behind him is ravaged by a dragon. A random horse on a dragon’s back as it circles above.
amen
Not having played other Elder Scroll games before Skyrim, I constantly felt lost, like I was missing out on some crucial tutorial that everyone else seemed to know about. Maybe it’s because there are areas you have to visit that unluck certain features, but by the time I was level, I don’t know 25?, and still hadn’t ever made a potion, I felt like I was ill-equipped to continue the game. After taking a few months of a break, when I came back to it, I’d forgotten all of the controls and all of the spells and combinations I’d previously learned, and it I felt just as lost again. I have no idea how far I made it into the game. Maybe I was close to the end of the main quest. Maybe I’d only scratched the surface of things. I don’t want hand holding in an open world game, but I wish I had some idea of what I didn’t know. I’d like to pick it up again, but at this point, I’d be starting from scratch on an outdated system gathering dust in my basement. I’d like to go back, but I honestly know I never will.
Hi ‘berc! For the most part you don’t have to indulge in every skill tree although it’s certainly possible to do so. But for example, I never bother with potions and it doesn’t hinder your progress in the game; you get or buy plenty powerful ones. You do have to know some very rudimentary spells to progress in one main story quest. I mostly play fighters with some dabbling in things like lockpicking, enchanting, and weapon smithing, but then I’ve played a thief that didn’t really do any enchanting or smithing either.
I wouldn’t worry about it. The game has a stellar reputation, but it’s very repetitive and (at this point) the gameplay is very dated.
I never touched a potion either. If you want an unforgettably Skyrim experience, try it in VR. Mounted archery is maybe the most exhilarating thing I’ve ever done in a video game:
Except it didn’t transform gaming, it’s just had the longest time between series entries that meant its modding scene has survived longer than other Bethesda games.Fallout 3 and New Vegas had such interesting modding scenes that Bethesda basically copied them in Fallout 4 with the former’s “Real Time Settler” getting made into a fundamental feature and the latter’s “Willow – A Better Companion Experience” being used in a lesser manner to become the archetype for all their companions in Fallout 4. Seriously I can’t praise Willow as a mod enough with how great a character it created, especially in a period when “horny teen” shovelware was the norm in the modding scene, and everyone with NV or looking to revisit should use the mod as an essential.The problem with those games however is a new entry came along and the scenes promptly died, with both F3 and NV nexus showing a severe drop off after F4 came out.
especially in a period when “horny teen” shovelware was the norm in the modding sceneYou mean like the (multiple!) mods to make female npcs topless?
Yep. It delivers a specific kind of escapism that I go back to around once a year or so.
Without mods I would have played it once, enjoyed it, and never played it again, but then I discovered the genius which is the Legacy of the Dragonborn mod, which adds a museum in Solitude with a multitude of displays to store all the cool items you find during your adventures and basically turns Skyrim into a really cool treasure hunt. Now I’m approaching 2000 hours of play across three different characters and it’s entirely due to that amazing mod.
My friend’s review:Not really digging this Skyrim game. So far it’s all elves and dragonbone, but there’s very little rimming.
I’m sure there’s a mod for that.
“Very little,” so apparently he did find some?
The modders are the reason I can still go back in to play Skyrim every 2 or 3 years and make it feel fresh. Last year I decided to switch to Mod Manager 2, and using Gamer Poet’s excellent Youtube tutorials I uninstalled and reinstalled the game, loaded up the new manager and began my most serious modding of Skyrim ever. The game looks so amazing that I dropped my actual quests for a pure wander around encounter style play. The modding community is already starting to post up instructions for how players can protect their current modded game from the coming Anniversary apocalypse wipe out. So many of these folks have been building these mods from early Skyrim days that their names on a mod equals ‘trusted’ to many players. A lot of them persevered when Bethesda made the jump from classic Skryim (aka Oldrim) to SE, and re-ported their excellent mods and game patches. I’ve always felt that Bethesda leaned hard into their modding community to keep Skyrim interesting. Now they are capitalizing on content creators by incorporating a curated list of stuff not made by Bethesda proper, while they throw in ‘fishing’. It’s a really crappy thing to do to a community that has kept Skyrim fresh all these years.
The best part about Skyrim is the sex&murder dungeons.
I played Skyrim back when it was new, and I have to admit not really enjoying it very much. I thought the main story was severely lacking. Some of the side quests were more interesting, though.
Nobody plays these games for the main story.
So… are they (Bethesda) ever gonna make another one of these? What’s the hold up?
They’re working on VI, but it’s so far off they won’t assign a date to it. I blame the lack of TESVI on Fallout 4 becoming a runaway smash early in the Xbox One/PS4 generation. That game being a AAA bro-game led to them wasting time on the disastrously-received Fallout 76 (which is supposedly better now, no clue if it’s true though), and by the time that was done, they wanted to do Starfield, which is their next release and is still a year off.
It’s the cardboard Hollywood movie set of videogames…. which, in my more generous moments, I’m willing to give credit for the game’s success. The fact that everything feels hollow and lifeless and generic kind of contributes to a feeling of malleability and freedom (similar to the more deliberate aesthetics of minecraft). If the characters were more like those in HZD or Last of Us everything would feel more constrained by the … competently assembled world, carefully curated to drag you through a specific experience. HZD is better-crafted, to a spectacular degree, in virtually every respect, but it doesn’t FEEL as open.
ALTHOUGH I DID PLAY AN UNMODDED SKYRIM WAY BACK WHEN IT FIRST CAME OUT, I COULD NOT IMAGINE DOING SO NOW. TEXTURES, WEATHER, BUG FIXES, THE APPEARANCE OF THE NPC’S…SERIOUSLY, LOOKING AT OLD PICTURES OF THE UNMODDED ORIGINAL NPC MODELS IS VERY MUCH NIGHTMARE FUEL. FORTUNATELY, I DO NOT SLEEP.
Oblivion is “my” Elder Scrolls game, and I desperately wish it’d come to Switch. However, with Skyrim turning ten, I realized I only really played it for about three months and 100 hours on release, and that was about it. So I booted it up on my Switch, and even as the stock game it’s just fantastic. I’ve put, like, 20 hours into it over the last week. I’m sure I’ll burn out on it at some point (I’ve never finished any of these Bethesda games), but at the moment I’m completely sucked in.
“It looks like Shuri has something to say. Do you?”“I have to go now. My planet needs me.”Title card: ‘Shuri died of COVID on the way back to her home planet.”There, I fixed Marvel’s problem and helped them give a nice vaccine PSA at the same time. I’ll take my check now, please.
Infinite scroll strikes again.
It’s not a perfect game, but I love exploring the world of Skyrim. Like Red Dead Redemption 2 (though not with the same level of graphics), it is an absolutely gorgeous world of trees, snowy mountains, rivers, farms, inns, shops, forts and castles and combined with the wonderful soundtrack (Frostfall being my favorite, it has a really mystical, otherworldly feel to it that I love) it just pulls me right in. It’s a book lover’s dream game too, I admit taking the time to read some of the many stories I come across. I do wish the main story were a little more compelling. The Dragonborn stuff is fun, the Stormcloak/Imperial war, eh, not so much. Combat can be a bit frustrating at times (surprise, surprise from Bethesda) and I wish the companions were a little more interesting. But it’s still a fun game, and getting launched 50ft in the air by a giant’s club never gets old. Plus, SHEOGORATH, DAEDRIC PRINCE OF MADNESS (charmed!) is a hoot.
Still my favorite 2D game experience, and I was thrilled to get to play it again in VR. There are mods that make it incredibly immersive. I haven’t played it in a while, should probably check in to see what my virtual wife and family are doing.