Good afternoon internet, being the nerdy The Elder Scrolls buff that I am, I’ve come to deliver you with some fresh news on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. In the month of April a few interesting gameplay insight videos were released on the web featuring Todd Howard.
To sum them up Skyrim, and Oblivion are two very different beasts. As we all know dragons play a key role in the storyline of Skyrim. The main character in which you play is a “Dragon Born”, which Howard describes as, “Anointed by the gods with the soul of a dragon”. He then gave us a very vague outline of the story being, you’re trying to unravel the mystery as to why dragons have returned.
Your character along with traditional weapons, and magic will be able to harness the power of shouts. A shout is a magical attack, resembling a spell, that is spoken loudly in dragon language. They have many different effects such as, staggering your opponent, or increasing your running speed drastically. Howard went on to say new shouts are learned from nordic temples devouted to dragons. At the moment there is said to be twenty, to twenty-four different shouts in total. As of yet, there has been no real information on perks, or how much they will impact the game.
As for the dragons themselves, they’ll be just like any other random enemy you encounter in the wild. Yes, that’s right, you can be riding your horse on a country side, and suddenly a dragon will swoop down and attack you. Howard says, “They go where they want to go, they do what they want to do, we don’t really have a set cap on how many dragons you’re going to see”. It was also stated that the dragons themselves use shouts, “When a dragon breathes fire, you’ll notice if you listen closely that it’s speaking” Howard commented. Every different type of dragon will have a different shout, this may be a clue of a secondary way to acquire them for your characters disposal.
The Bethesda team is also very proud of their new engine known as “The Creation Engine”. It’s called this because just about everything was created from scratch. “We thought about waiting for the next console cycle to reboot The Elder Scrolls, but we felt like there was so much we could do”, Howard says. The new engine will fix all past major issues that fans had about Morrowind, and Oblivion, such as blotchy movement, and horrible character interaction. To everyone’s relief it was announced early on the Oblivion leveling system was scrapped. With this news, I can only expect great things from the new engine.
On a much…stranger note Bethesda has offered a lifetime of free games their company produces to a lucky couple. However, in order to be awarded this fabulous prize, you must have a child born on Skyrim’s released date (11/11/11), and name that child “Dovahkin”(Dragon Born). I personally wouldn’t consider this….unless it could be the middle name….
Well that’s about it for this Skyrim update, we’ll keep you updated when we know more though.