The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - On this day

On this day ten years ago, we yelled at dragons and provoked giants in Skyrim. The fifth installment of The Elder Scrolls franchise was a real blizzard that year and brought us a huge world that became the benchmark for other games. Whenever someone tried to conjure up the size of their open-world, they would compare it to the one from Skyrim where we had over 300 significant locations.

Of interest at that number of sites was a system called Radiant A.I. who sent the player through quests to places he had not yet visited. The Radiant system expanded to the rest of the game, making the world of Skyrim an organic place, and the so-called adventure. Dragonborn is less linear.

Skyrim was based on the Creation Engine launcher and was among the most beautiful games on the market at the time. Unfortunately, it wasn’t equally good on all platforms so the PlayStation 3 version became infamous for its technical issues and jerky performance that was never fixed.

On the other hand, the game was popular on the PC years later, primarily because of the active and diligent modding community that made the game a miracle. With total conversions like Enderal, Falskaar, Beyond Skyrim, and others, TES 5 today offers a wide range of different experiences. To make things better, the modding community is not yet fed up with the game and some of the most interesting mods, like Skywind, are yet to come.

Skyrim is best remembered for the equally legendary trailer with which it was premiered. I consider it one of the best-made trailers for a video game. Just be warned - chances are high that it will make you go dragon hunting again.

Skyrim sold more than seven million copies in its first week and was eventually played by over 30 million players, which is a huge amount for an RPG title. The game received three DLC packages: Dawnguard, Hearthfire and Dragonborn, and Legendary Edition with all content. In 2016, we got a remaster called the Special Edition, and in 2017 Skyrim for PlayStation VR and Nintendo Switch platforms. As of today, the Anniversary Edition is also on sale with a bunch of Creation Content content - including fishing.

At Bethesda, they accepted the joke, and at the E3 fair 2018, they mockingly announced Skyrim for Amazon's Alexa device. However, the mockery was not complete, and Skyrim got a version without a picture.

The successor to Skyrim has been announced in 2018, but is still in development and will be for some time to come. Bethesda has confirmed that it will be a single-player adventure, but they will have to offer more than that because their image is not the best lately after the Fallout 76 fiasco. Bethesda is now owned by Microsoft, so it is also questionable whether the Elder Scrolls series will be available on Sony and Nintendo consoles in the future.