9 Reasons Skyrim Is Still One Of The Best Video Games Of All Time
Five years later, this hasn't aged a day.
If there's one thing a remaster or special edition of a game should do, it's live up to the rose-tinted vision of said game you have in your mind. Because I guarantee, right now, if you think back to something like Halo's Silent Cartographer or Medal of Honor: Frontline's D-Day mission, you picture them as immaculately produced, NPC-filled extravaganzas of animation and graphical prowess.
Sadly, that's not the case.
More often than not, if you pop in an old classic, you'll be taken aback by just how far the industry has come in all sorts of key areas. Now, granted, Skyrim has always been a bit of a looker, but upon journeying back to Tamriel, there's a certain wave of nostalgia mixed with "Yup, this is still brilliant" that's just intoxicating.
Skyrim's Special Edition proves many things: How to do a re-release with all the best content and additional features (like mods), which graphical areas to touch up and which performance ticks need smoothing over, but most of all, it proves one thing: Just why Skyrim is - and always will be - one of the greatest video games of all time.
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9. It's Bethesda's Most Heartfelt Work
I don't know about you, but there was something a little lacking in Fallout 4 - something about its various interworking systems (and especially the Settlement stuff) that felt a bit 'bolted on'. A bit 'going through the motions.'
This couldn't be farther from the truth with their 2011/2016 masterwork. Everything from the sound of the wind whipping up around your ears as you clamber up a mountainside, to the occasional droplet of water padding out the background of a dank cave - almost every last pixel, voxel and 3D model was hand-crafted and placed for your enjoyment.
Having grown and matured as a studio through four mammoth Elder Scrolls titles beforehand, it affords Bethesda a level of experience and dedication to the genre that no other developer even comes close to.
There's no No Man's Sky-level procedural generation here (not that there's anything wrong with that), but on the contrary, you can feel the sheer labour of love that went into crafting what is next to World of Warcraft, easily the greatest fantasy-themed entertainment product in history.