E3 2011: Skyrim: It's in the Details

Listening to Bethesda Game Studios explain its latest Elder Scrolls game in demo sessions can be a bit overwhelming. It's impossible to try and squeeze everything from the game into something like a half-hour session, so many throwaway comments made while the demo's running could gloss over a feature that represents tens of hours of gameplay. There's so much going on in Skyrim, from dramatic encounters with dragons to the ways you can disrupt the economies of individual towns by messing with their lumber mills, that it's great to see Bethesda hasn't overlooked the details either.

By details, I mean the finer points of the presentation. The way fish will jump up small waterfalls in swift streams, or the way clouds drift around the peaks of craggy, snow-clogged mountain peaks. I mean the way the horses animate with a noticeable sense of weight to each hoof step as you ride them up rocky passes into hostile territory. The way every spell you equip produces a different effect in your character's hand, like shards of light while the Circle of Protection spell is active and strips of electrical energy for your lightning spell.

I know these types of things may seem minor, but I've always felt detail like this does a lot to make the world more believable. If you get attacked by a frost dragon, for instance, its frigid breath will coat your equipped axe in ice. It's an effect that's so logical it can easily be overlooked, but one that lends even more of a sense of excitement to the battle.

This attention to the finer points of presentation extends to the interface, reworked in Skyrim to be less cluttered. Your character's skills are displayed as star constellations, and as you dive into each to see the individual perks contained within they're displayed as stars within each celestial pattern. The text that pops up while in conversation and while quick-swapping weapons and armor is designed to be unobtrusive, so it that it doesn't feel like it's calling any more attention to itself than it has to. Models of all the items, from the more impressive pieces of armor and weapons down to individual herbs, can be inspected, rotated and zoomed in on however you see fit.

Effects big and small, from the bassy thud of dragons as they slam down to the ground from the sky to the multitudes of books you can read in your inventory, make me look forward to Skyrim all the more. Maybe these details are something a more casual role-playing fan might not care as much about, but to me it shows an extreme level of care.