I Got To Skyrim Way Too Late

thegamer.com:

By the time I finally got into The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, its world had been razed. Not by the fire-breathing dragons that inhabit the lands of Tamriel, but by the six years that had passed since its initial release.

I picked up Bethesda Game Studios' landmark RPG when it finally made its way to a Nintendo system, arriving in remastered form with Link- and Mario-themed goodies in its inventory. It was the end of 2017, I had just received a Switch and its tiny Skyrim cartridge for Christmas, and I was ready to kick back and enjoy what, according to the list-makers, was one of the greatest RPGs of all time. It didn't really do it for me.

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When I eventually loaded Skyrim up on my Switch, I had already played some of the big open-world RPGs that followed in its wake. I didn't play many games at all when I was in college from 2012 to 2016. But when I got out, I made up for lost time and quickly bought a bunch of the big games that I had missed. It became not exactly an all-consuming hobby, but certainly a most-consuming hobby. And that hobby led me to start writing about games on my blog, then to doing volunteer reviews for a site, then to writing about games professionally as a freelancer, and, finally, to writing about games full-time. As I made that journey, Skyrim wasn't one of the foundational games for me. Later works like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn were.

When I finally picked Skyrim up in 2017, it felt like a game I had already played. Its first-person in-engine intro which broke out into violent chaos felt a little like the opening to The Last of Us, when Joel, Tommy, and Sarah attempt to escape the outbreak