You can craft your own armor, weapons, and potions. Reagents can be found by salvaging/disenchanting unwanted equipment or finding it out in the open world via gathering skills and looting. You can use recipes, but the most fun comes from randomly mixing and matching ingredients together to customize your own craftables. Once you've forged that perfect piece of armor or weapon, you can even give it whatever you name you want. Being able to custom build and name your crafted creations adds an exciting new layer to crafting and makes it feel very personalized.
You play as the "Fateless One", a character who was dead but brought back to life at the beginning of the game. With your second chance at life, you are now freed from the bonds of fate in a world controlled by destiny.
During your adventures, you meet many different factions and characters, some hostile and some friendly, but most have interesting stories to tell and quests for you to complete. Oftentimes these main quests branch off into many varied and interesting side quests which will lead to even more lore. Almost everywhere you step in the game world offers a new story of a village in peril or a lost treasure waiting to be discovered.
The story and lore itself are written by best selling fantasy author R.A. Salvatore. All the locations and characters were thus given an intense attention to detail that makes the world a deep and interesting place. Everything is interconnected, rather than just a bunch of lore that was hastily thrown together. While it may seem overwhelming at first, once you have a few hours under your belt, it's easy to become intrigued with this world, it's dynamic characters, and plethora of mysteries.
There is no such thing as a bad build in KoA:R. The skill trees are constructed so well that literally every build is viable. Due to the fact you can respec at any time, you are always free to experiment and try something new.
For combat abilities, there are three main skill trees with the basic archetypes of warrior, mage, and rogue, but you are not locked into any particular tree. You can mix and match any skills from any tree to customize your own fighting style. If you want to be a sneaky rogue that carries a huge longsword or a warrior who casts spells, you can do it.
In addition to battle builds, you can also choose among skills like dispelling, lockpicking, blacksmithing, persuasion, etc. These non-combat skills will dynamically effect your interactions with the world. With dispelling, for example, you'll be able to loot hidden treasure chests that are protected with magic. With persuasion, you'll be given extra dialogue options such as convincing merchants to give you discounted goods.
Thanks to the flexibility and great design of the skill/ability trees, you will always be finding engaging and exciting ways to pummel your foes in combat and interact with the world.
The world itself is absolutely massive, featuring two whole continents. There are dozens upon dozens of locations including a few giant, fully explorable cities. You are free to travel anywhere at will on the first continent, with the second one unlocking around mid-game. From there, you are free to travel between them. Getting around is easy, since you can fast travel to any location on the map that you've previously discovered. This makes exploring and discovering new things a breeze.
Going off the beaten path is often encouraged, with treasure chests, crafting reagents, out-of-the-way dungeons, small villages, and side quests everywhere. Everywhere you go, you'll be finding someone who needs your help or a new dungeon to explore. The sheer amount of content in the huge open world is incredible.
The arcade style, fast-paced combat is where the game truly shines. Whether you're swinging a massive battle hammer, slicing with daggers, or throwing fireballs, it's just so incredibly responsive and smooth. Hits feel powerful in your hands, and the accompanying vibrant and colorful battle animations are great to watch. Additionally, you can dodge and block actively giving it some strategic depth as you're rolling between enemies and holding up your shield to soak spells.
Despite its fast-paced nature, there's no complexity weighing it down. Executing attacks and chaining combos is made super easy in just a few button presses. Enemies are auto targeted when they're in range, so you'll never miss the mark. That means you can hit an enemy in front of you, and just by attacking again, your character will spin around and hit the one behind you. It looks incredible, feels awesome, and is just straight up fun to play. The combat is easily one of the best aspects of this game.
There is no jumping in this game, making some areas annoying to navigate. Sometimes doing something simple like getting over a fence, small hill, or rock requires a long walk around it.
You cannot zoom the camera in or out. This can be disheartening when trying to look around, especially when trying to take in the view in some of the gorgeous areas of the game world.
With the exception of a few dungeon bosses on hard mode, the difficulty level is a bit on the low side. Most enemies pose no real threat, even in large numbers. One reason for this is that it's very easy to become overpowered. Even at lower character levels, the weapons and armor you can find or craft feel disproportionately strong.
After completing certain story quests NPCs get new lines added to their dialogue based on your decisions. Sometimes the NPCs might become forgetful and return to their default dialogue, which can break immersion, especially if they talk about an event that's been long resolved.
Fights within the game don't have very many options. "Headshots" don't matter, and most combat options in the game are poorly balanced.
Few examples:
Doesn't really matter if you go mace, sword or axe, fire, ice or lightning, or even two handed vs dual wielding. The options mostly add flavor to your character and little else.
Despite the fact that you might have ranged attacks, dragons are impossible to hit while in the air, so you end up fighting them similarly to a melee character.
"Twincasting" the first healing spell is actually worse than just casting it once in each hand.
Illusion magic becomes useless at later levels, since the spells don't do anything if the enemy is too high level and enemies scale to your level.
Enemies are too stupid to make hiding a bad thing.
The worst one is leveling as an Alteration mage, which gives you access to the Dragonskin spell, granting maximum armor for 30 seconds and has a 5 second cast time. Or you could just go Heavy Armor, level that up (so it weighs nothing) and have maximum armor ALWAYS without ever having to cast an Alteration spell before combat ever again.
Combat comes down to how you leveled, not how you play.
While the game offers players many choices some of these choices are not reflected in the game accurately. There are instances where NPCs should know who your character is or what classes they belong to but due to the limitations of the tech used in the game it is unable to "remember" these things and so NPC text will often break immersion in the game by saying the wrong things.
The in-game map is absolutely gigantic. There are so many places to go and so much to do in the world, easily giving you hundreds of hours of content.
Exploring the wide range of environments, from the snowy mountains to the richly-detailed towns and cities is such a joy because of how lush and beautiful everything is. Wandering around often surprises you with new side quests to find off the beaten path, with new characters to meet and history to learn about in whichever area you find yourself in. You can get into all sorts of battles with powerful enemies or stumble into hidden dungeons with awesome loot at the end. Or you can sneak around towns at night stealing peoples' stuff while they're asleep to sell everything off for money. And there's just a ton of other intriguing secrets and fun diversions to discover as you adventure throughout the world.
You can set off to any of Skyrim's different towns and discover new storylines from interesting factions that flesh out the world and the lore, with great characters and their own absorbing narratives to get lost in. There are a good number of these factions, like the scholars at the snowy College of Winterhold, the secretive assassins of the Dark Brotherhood, or the cohort of rogues and bandits of the Thieves Guild. After picking whichever faction you want to learn more about, you can eventually become a Master of the guild and learn new skills for your character. Playing through each of their individual stories lets you really feel like a member of the faction you choose, like with how the Thieves Guild sends you on missions to pick locks and steal valuables without getting caught by the guards.
And if you only get through some of the faction's story and decide you don't enjoy it, you can easily go find another one and play through that one instead. There are no limits on how you play through the plot, with Skyrim giving you the flexibility to pick up stories, set them down, and come back to them whenever you feel like it.
Skyrim has no concept of character classes, and there are no restrictions on what equipment or magic a given character can use or learn. A character's capabilities are defined by skills (e.g. heavy armor, marksman, enchantment) which automatically improve as they are used. Levels are gained by increasing skills, and each level grants one perk -- a passive, secondary effect which further enhances a particular skill -- and increases an attribute of your choice (Magicka, Stamina or Health).
Things like stealing (and getting caught), fighting or killing in towns will change how the game plays as now those people or towns will be angry with the player, which makes things much more difficult. There are also many moral choices in game such as if one should betray the person who gave then their quest by keeping the treasure they were hired to return. All of these things will change how the game plays and how NPC's react to the character making for a simulated real world of consequences.
The Elder Scrolls series stretches back 20 years and has always focused on providing a rich world to explore. Skyrim inherits the stories and world-building of over half a dozen previous games.
Bethesda Softworks has upheld a tradition of releasing their internal content-creation tools to the public since Morrowind (2002). Many modders transition to new Bethesda games as they are released, bringing their experience with them and helping newcomers through forums and wikis. As a result, Skyrim's mod selection is outstanding in both variety and quality.
Skyrim, like all Bethesda in house game engines (GameBryo) is buggy and prone to crashing. Non modded games have plenty of issues, but to then add mods on top is just asking for a crash or corrupt game save.
There are still many community mods for Skyrim that try to make the game more stable by addressing memory issues and general buggynes. While the game is not as buggy as it was upon release, there are still many people that have issues with the game crashing on boot or just randomly which is why these mods are still widely used and still very relevant.
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