The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Preview

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Skyrim's in-game world may be a more or less similar size to Oblivion's, but the amount of detail changes everything, and not just because the surfeit of climbable mountains adds so much vertical scale. Screenshots don't do the game justice; they don't convey the motion and lighting that makes this cold world seem so vibrant, and they also suggest it's just a game about bashing monsters.

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Here are just a few examples of Skyrim's scope. A town's economy can be disrupted by cruelly (or for quest reasons) trashing its lumber mill; in turn, the price of wooden equipment such as arrows will be affected. Monsters and animals are no longer mindless killers, but roam the world with their own agendas - witness the hulking, somehow-sad Giant that thunders slowly past you without a second glance, or the pack of wolves that work together to take down a poor mammoth.

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Many of the quests are now semi-procedurally generated too, cobbling together on-the-fly vignettes - so a challenge to save a villager's child from a nearby dungeon will not be pre-written, but rather based on the game picking a local villager with a child and deciding in which dungeon the nipper will be trapped. To avoid dreary mechanical churn, the story is handwritten, but the key elements and characters are random.

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