Bethesda Softworks just announced the fifth game in the Elder Scrolls series and the sequel to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion will be called Skyrim. And it’ll be out next year.
Bethesda’s Todd Howard introduced the game with a brief teaser showing a stone dragon and a dramatic narration that sets up the story of the next big role-playing game in the Elder Scrolls series. That teaser also dates Skyrim for November 11, 2011.
Teaser trailer in the link. Not much to go on, but I’m glad they are heading to Skyrim.
EDIT: elderscrolls.com has been updated as a teaser for Skyrim. Nothing much there except the teaser trailer video.
I actually really liked the dawns in fire line, coupled with the heat of dragon’s breath distorting the relief sculpture. It’s totally unexpected.
Edit: Actually on watching it again, the dragon is still part of the relief, so it’s combination of a heat effect and a stone relief depiction of fire. It’s still pretty cool. I originally interpreted it as the dragon waking up and separating from the art itself as if it were sleeping in a mountain side.
Oblivion was too hard at release, Fallout 3 ludicrously easy. Maybe they’ll pick a middle ground! Also: make up your mind on “leveling by skill use” already.
Oblivion was only difficult if you accidentally screwed yourself with the level scaling. I was level 17 or 18 by the time I got around to the town that was under attack by the forces of Oblivion and I had to fight for every single inch of ground.
“Skyrim” makes it sound like it takes place in some sort of floating land? I hope so because that would be much better than generic fantasy setting 5.0.
As Matt mentions, it was really uneven. For RPG professionals, no, but for the bulk of the gaming public the leveling system I think resulted in them just dropping it at some point because it was too damn hard.
I’m also quite surprised by this. The day after Oblivion came out mods started to appear to slow down the levelling or make harder spawn lists.
All the AI does is running straight at the player and switch to melee within a certain radius. It would also get easily stuck everywhere if you just have some space to maneuver.
And in any case you could just go to the options and change the difficulty slider that affects both damage done and received, making you basically invulnerable.
If you have to resort to breaking the game, changing the difficulty, or installing mods, there’s probably room for improvement. And let’s not forget that a very large chunk of the Oblivion-playing public cannot install mods because they’re playing on a console.
No - Skyrim is the frigid northlands* of Tamriel. It’s due north of Cyrodiil, where Oblivion is set, and West/Northwest of Morrowind. The people of Skyrim are the Nords.
Skyrim is significant because when the race of Man came to Tamriel and overthrew the Elves, they came first from Skyrim. The Nords of Skyrim & the Dunmer of Morrowind still skirmish to this day.
It’s also significant because it was the home of Tiber Septim, who was called Talos, Ysmir, Dragonborn, and Dragon of the North, and who founded the empire. Ysmir began his conquest by conquering the Nords - afterwhich it was said that the Nords saw a dragon when they looked at him.
Following the events of Oblivion, the Septim dynasty could use some fresh blood.
Also also significant: there are no dragons in Tamriel, except for Akatosh, the Dragon God of Time, whose blood flowed in the Septim line. Or I should say, there are no dragons yet.
*Because one character class always hails from the frigid northlands.
