The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
2011 open world action role-playing video game
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a 2011 action role-playing game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. It is the fifth main installment in The Elder Scrolls series, following The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), and was released worldwide for Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 on November 11, 2011. Skyrim was developed using the Creation Engine. The team opted for a rugged, largely sub-arctic world, after Oblivion's Imperial Province of Cyrodiil, which game director and executive producer Todd Howard considered more unique by comparison.
The game is set 201 years after the events of Oblivion and takes place in Skyrim, the northernmost province of Tamriel, a continent on the planet Nirn. Its main story focuses on the player character, the Last Dragonborn, on their quest to defeat Alduin the World-Eater, a dragon prophesied to destroy the world. Throughout the game, the player completes quests and develops the character by improving skills. The game continues the open world tradition of its predecessors by allowing the player to travel to discovered locations in the game world at any time, and to ignore or postpone the main storyline indefinitely.
Upon release, the game received critical acclaim, with praise for its character advancement, world design, visuals, and the ability to dual-wield in combat. Criticism targeted the melee combat, dragon battles, and numerous technical issues at launch.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.