I’m sitting in a tavern in Markarth on the brink of a total breakdown. The year is 2011, Skyrim has just been released, and I have spent what feels like hours desperately trying to leave the Silver-Blood Inn, but every time I touch the doors to leave my game crashes. At the time, the idea that this game would go on to become one of the biggest of all time seemed about as likely as me ever escaping my stony Kafkaesque tomb. But once those early bugs were patched, Skyrim rightly became an instant sensation, becoming one of the best-selling games of the year and the winner of dozens of awards.
Then, in the years that followed, something even more unexpected happened: Skyrim kept getting bigger and bigger. The game sold ten million copies when it was released, but within two years that figure had hit 20 million. Within five years Skyrim had sold 30 million copies. Such is its enduring appeal that it has been released on every major console, from PC to Nintendo Switch and even VR. Ten years on from its initial release, Bethesda has announced plans for an anniversary edition re-release. When that happens, it will be the seventh time Skyrim has been released.
Sure, a game staying relevant for several years isn’t unheard of, but such longevity almost always always applies to freemium online games like Fortnite or GTA Online. Then there’s Skyrim – a single-player RPG. Which begs the question: what is it about Skyrim that has kept it going and going?
First of all, it’s accessible. The controls for everything from fighting to stealth are relatively easy to master, while features like quest markers make it easy to navigate. “Skyrim rides the very fine line between being accessible to a lot of players who would have otherwise never played video games but still complex and deep enough to people for whom video games is their hobby,” says William Sparks, one of the moderators of the Skyrim subreddit.
Then there’s the fact that the player has a huge amount of choice. The fighting in the game, from magic to swords, bows and more, is diverse and lets you take a completely different approach every time you start a new play-through. Then there’s the world itself – full to the brim with locations to explore, side quests and a never-ending line-up of NPCs. Time estimates to fully explore the world range from the hundreds of hours to even into the thousands. Only 33 hours of that are made up of the main quest.
And the world itself is rich in detail. “Skyrim was full of individual developers who took their own corner of the world and tried to make something interesting,” says Nate Purkeypile, a former Bethesda developer who helped create the game’s castles and caves. “Lots of games get designed by checklist and they have a more uniform feel to it, whereas with Skyrim you never quite know what to expect in all these different places.” For Purkeypile, one such special touch he added was skylights in the game’s cave systems, which allowed for beautifully lit cavernous environments with plants, rivers and trees. Overall, Purkeypile says, when Bethesda started working on Skyrim it wasn’t trying to build a game, it was trying to build a world.
Then there’s the strategy from Bethesda, which has dedicated substantial time and effort to remastering the game for new consoles while also releasing new content and major DLCs like Dawnguard and Hearthfire. The studio has also been proactive in reworking and improving the game to match the march of technological progress, in particular for a 2017 release on the Nintendo Switch and for VR. Skyrim’s Switch sales were so successful that Bethesda subsequently committed to releasing more games for the console. “There was a huge influx of people who had never played Skyrim six or seven years after it first came out,” Sparks says of its release on the Switch. “We saw hundreds of thousands of new users and subscribers when that happened.” Sparks adds that membership of the Skyrim subreddit has more than doubled in the last four years to 1.3 million. And that dedicated and growing fan base also plays into one of the other reasons Skyrim has been able to stay relevant: modding.
“Skyrim changed my entire life,” says Emmi Junkkari, who under the name Elianora has produced hundreds of mods for Skyrim over the years. “I was a cashier when I started, now I’m the co-founder of an indie games developer.” Unlike most other AAA studios, Bethesda has embraced the burgeoning modding community around its games, giving them access to the Creation Kit, a tool that helps fans use Skyrim’s base game files and code to reshape the world of Tamriel in their image. That helped give the game one of if not the most active modding community in video games.
The largely unprecedented decision to support mods on consoles, as Bethesda did with its 2016 remaster, only added to that. “The game is so open. Don’t like a quest? Change the ending. It lets you do that. I don’t know of many other games that are so moddable,” says Junkkari. “I feel like I’m never finished.” A cursory search for viral videos of dragons re-skinned as Thomas the Tank Engine or the Jedi of Skyrim gives you a gauge of the cultural influence they’ve had.
Mods range from the bizarre to the frankly unfathomable. One mod, Enderal, was a total redesign of the entire game produced over eight years by a group of amateur developers. “Most studios are hesitant to reveal their engine and give everyone access to their development tools and Bethesda does that,” says Nicolas Lietzau, one of the lead developers behind the project. “Mods like Enderal have nothing to do with the base game anymore. Skyrim just provides a great backbone, an excellent foundation to start from.”
Even the game’s infamous bugs have added to that charm and community. Videos of giants smashing players into the moon and horses randomly flying into the sky have garnered millions of views, without actually undermining the game itself. “Bethesda games wouldn’t be Bethesda games without those bugs,” says Junkkari. “Without them, we wouldn’t have half as much to laugh about really.”
All of this combines to make each play-through of the game feel unique. “It’s different every time you play,” says Sparks. “It's almost like a different game every time.” And that cuts to the core of why Skyrim won’t die and why we all keep coming back to it, year after year, in greater and greater numbers. It all comes down to that moment when you leave the tutorial in Helgen and look out and see a world where you can do anything you want to and be whatever you want to be. Total freedom. And if the base game doesn’t support that yet, there will certainly be a mod for it. “That feeling of being able to go anywhere that to me is what Skyrim is. That promise,” Purkeypile says.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
