A fog begins to clear and you begin to see a land in which you will spend so much of your time. Shadows cast by the mountain ranges spanning across the country hide more than meets the eye, but you can still make out wild evergreens, stone walls and cobbled paths, and a great many secrets waiting to be found.
And then, a roar echoes like a bomb in the distance. Everyone stops, preparing for their lives to change.
This, constructed so well in the world of gaming, is the vast, wondrous dragon-scape of Skyrim.
Coming this late October, is the new revamped, remastered special edition of the role-playing masterpiece first released in November of 2011. The game will not be perfect now, nor was it perfect back then, but even so few RPGs have matched the sheer popularity, lore-steeped stories, and amazing replay value of Skyrim.
For those who aren't familiar, (I think that'd be a darn shame, but I digress) this installment of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series takes place in a snowy, Nordic realm where you begin to play as a prisoner about to be executed. Tensions of a civil war ache around you in the voices of the townsfolk as the government prepares to go all Queen of Hearts on you. (i.e. "Off with your head!") But just as the wide axe is about to fall, a black-scaled dragon with the voice of a fire-breathing devil speaking the language of dragons erupts from the sky (Actually he was sent forward in time from the past, banished if you will, but again moving on...) and he interrupts everything, slaughtering as you ready for battle.
From there, you come to realize later that your character is the Dragonborn, a warrior with the ability to slay dragons and envelop their souls. Whether or not you use this power for good or evil only scratches the surface of the open-world magnificence that is Skyrim, and now millions of players will be able to relive it all again, this time with next-gen adjustments to graphics, sounds, and so much more. (Sony, in this writer's opinion, fouled up by banning PlayStation console mods, but that's another matter entirely.)
Look for Skyrim right before Halloween, fellow gamers. And beware the dragons, the caves undiscovered, and the magic ready to unfold.
