Molly's Blog

keeps me coming back over 10 years later.

Ever since I had the capacity to form memories, I have played video games. My parents didn’t understand my passion for these fantasy worlds, but my brother did and we played them for hours a day. I also loved to play outside and climb trees because my mother’s house was next to the woods that held so many secrets and possibilities for a young child. The combination of those interests culminated into an adult who was the perfect audience for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

When I went to college at 18, I didn’t bring my any of my gaming consoles and used a Mac for schoolwork that had one game on it at most because macbooks aren’t the best for video games. Once I came home for the summer, however, all bets were off and I would spent days in my mom’s basement getting lost in the magical land that Bathesda created. My first Bathesday game was Oblivion when my brother suggested the game and let me use his Xbox 360 to experience one of his favorite games at the time. I spent the first 7 hours just wandering around and looking at the amazing scenery so lovingly crafted for gamers like me. Once Skyrim was announced, I waited with baited breath for that same magic to appear once again.

Skyrim is an RPG adventure game with nordic and medieval tones that has dragons, assassins, magic, kings, queens, etc. The best part about Skyrim for me is the open world full of side quests and interesting details strewn about the towns, caverns, forests, tundras, and homes. It could be as simple as reading a letter out on a table of a local tavern threatening a debtor or an adventurer’s body right outside a cave with a book detailing what they were hoping to plunder in this very cave. As much as I love this game, there is some things that need to be said about the company that owns the franchise currently: Bathesda.

Bathesda is known for creating and releasing games in a buggy state. Bugs and glitches are features in video games that do not work quite right or something looks a little off. Some examples would be a character that looks like they are swimming that are on dry land or a wolly mammoth shooting into the sky unexpectedly. Both of those examples I have seen in Skyrim many times.

Another game Bathesday released a few years ago was Fallout 76 that was full of bugs and not optimized for online play with friends. My husband and I had several instances where we could not see each other’s characters and that made it hard to play together.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why Skyrim is so special and why people are still playing it over 10 years later. It is a combination, I think, of environment, excellent music, characters, dialog, and tiny details that set Skyrim apart from all the rest.