Skyrim - Preview @ RPS

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has some first-hand impressions of Skyrim from E3:

So what can I tell you about it? Well, it’s The Elder Scrolls, and we all want more of that (yes, you Oblivion haters, you DO – no one is the least bit fooled by your antics). It’s a beautiful frost-bitten land, and it’s one where players need never let the main quest trouble them as they play for dozens of hours.

Of what we were shown – a trek through green fields, woods, a village, dungeons, and eventually a mountain-top dragon fight – the most exciting feature was the player’s hands. That’s not dismissive. They’re brilliant. Every single-handed weapon can be dual-wielded, meaning you can improvise your own style to some quite impressive degrees. Sword and shield combat looked especially entertaining. Holding up a shield has always been so disappointing in gaming, but here it felt like it was genuinely protective. Obscuring most your view, seeing the edge of the attacker slamming into it felt intense.

But even more entertaining is the magic. There’s all manner of magic types, from Runes to regular spells to Shouts, each of which make your hands glow an appropriate colour. Spells are assigned to hands in the same way as weapons – in fact, this can even be done from the same menu. There’s a “favourites” option, much like a web browser, that lets you opt for your preferred tools and spells to appear in a quickly accessible pop-up menu, letting you quickly assign to each hand in an on-the-fly paused moment. If such a thing isn’t a massive contradiction.