The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

I have spent more hours in Skyrim than I care to admit to a therapist, and the honest answer to 'does it hold up' is: mostly yes, with some significant asterisks. You drop into the frozen province of Tamriel's north as the Dragonborn, a mortal with the rare ability to absorb dragon souls and weaponize them as Shouts, powerful voiced abilities that can hurl enemies off cliffs, freeze time, or call a dragon ally. The main quest is built around hunting down Alduin the World-Eater, but the real game lives in the margins. Thick with joinable factions, the Dark Brotherhood assassination questline and the Thieves Guild storyline both deliver more narrative texture than the main plot, and the Companions questline has a decent werewolf arc that surprised me on my third playthrough. Combat is the weakest pillar, and honesty demands saying so clearly. Your toolkit covers one-handed and two-handed weapons, dual-wield magic, staves, a bow-and-sneak archery build that famously breaks difficulty scaling once you invest the right perk tree nodes, and a shield-block playstyle that makes harder difficulties manageable. Light attack, heavy attack, block. That is the mechanical floor and the ceiling, unless you mod. The perk system, spread across 18 skill trees covering everything from Smithing and Enchanting to Illusion and Conjuration, provides genuine build identity - a pure necromancer who never swings a sword genuinely plays differently from a heavily armored Two-Handed warrior. Past hour 40 those differences start to flatten as character power outscales enemy scaling, and filler dungeons do start to blur together. The worldbuilding carries the weight the combat cannot. Hundreds of in-game books are actually worth reading and feed directly into encounters you will have later, which is the kind of environmental storytelling design I wish more studios still cared about. The elephant in the room for PC players in 2024 is mods. The modding community on Nexus Mods alone has produced thousands of free modifications ranging from complete graphical overhauls to combat system replacements, new questlines, and bug fixes that Bethesda itself never shipped. Without mods, the vanilla UI is clunky, textures in the base game show their age, and character facial animations during dialogue are stiff in a way that is hard to unsee after playing something like BG3. With a modest mod list, Skyrim genuinely looks and plays like a modern game. That gap between vanilla and modded is the single most important thing to understand before buying on PC. Bugs and quest-breaking glitches have always been part of the experience too, a Bethesda tradition lovingly tolerated but worth flagging for players who expect a clean, polished product. Who is this for right now? First-time players who want the defining open-world RPG of a generation will find an enormous, dense world where emergent stories happen whether you go looking for them or not. The freedom is still dizzying. Returning players who modded heavily in the past have a reason to dive back in with updated mod ecosystems. Players coming from tightly written CRPGs like Disco Elysium or Pillars of Eternity should lower narrative expectations considerably: Skyrim's dialogue is functional rather than literary, and faction choices rarely produce the branching consequences a hardcore RPG fan wants. If your priority is deep reactive writing, this is not your game. If your priority is exploration, atmosphere, and build tinkering, very few games in the last decade have matched it.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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