When I sat down to a few hours of hands-on time with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim last week, the publisher’s representative hit me with a huge list of things I wasn’t allowed to talk about — basically, story elements I might encounter if I took a critical-path approach to the demo and pursued the story’s primary quest line with sufficient efficiency. He needn’t have bothered. My bumbling approach to the adventure was the furthest thing from a pursuit of the critical path.
The demo let me roll my own character, who I made into a hideous High Elf enchantress (I named her Lady GAAAAHHH GAAAAHHH); I was given an impressive wealth of facial feature options all the way down to laugh lines. But the demo didn’t actually kick off at the beginning of the game. My newly minted heroine entered the world in a small cave on the side of a snowy mountain — apparently a short distance into the story, perhaps the equivalent of beginning Oblivion‘s quest shortly after the jailbreak and assassination of Emperor Septimus. Aside from a handful of loot, some starter gear, and a fire spell, my avatar stepped out of her alcove and onto Skyrim’s vast, snowy mountainsides with nothing to her name and no real pointers as to her objectives, destinations, or ambitions.
