The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is an open world role playing game released by Bethesda in November 2011. The game is designed in such a way to make the player feel totally immersed as they explore the game’s world of Skyrim. Players have total freedom to explore every nook and cranny of the game with a multitude of quests, dungeons, and treasure to find. In addition the world of Skyrim would also function as a living breathing world. This was a herculean undertaking by Bethesda, creating the entire land of Skyrim in the virtual world from the ground up, even building a new game engine, to be able to house this world to explore in allowing players to build their own experiences in the game. As an open world game Skyrim needed to exhibit realistic physics in order for the world to be believable to avoid breaking the immersive experience, while still pushing the limits of physics to the fantastic to match the fantasy environment; as well as predicting the actions of the people playing the game.
The central feature of Skyrim, which is usually the first topic of conversation among fans, is the freedom to do whatever you please and how alive the world feels. One of the main reasons a game world can feel life like is how it moves and behaves. As the villagers move about their day, they will engage in activities such as wood chopping, forging, or using the mill, which the player can also engage in as well as shown in the video below.
You can clearly see the weight put into the actions carried out. One of the key elements to include in an animation of movement is weight. We know that a log is very heavy, and if the character appeared to roll it onto the mill too easily, we would notice that it doesn’t look right and would be taken out of the experience. The third action demonstrated in the video, wood chopping, is where we can observe the odd rule. The odd rule is where actions are spaced out on frames 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 which allows for the action to slow in then pick up speed. This allows to give the sense that the object has a great amount weight behind it, allowing the player to translate how heavy something is and how powerful an attack will be.
Walking is one of the ways players will travel across Skyrim before buying (or stealing) a horse. A walk cycle is the feature that can make or break a character. We already know how someone should walk, and if a walk cycle is incorrectly executed, we find ourselves in the uncanny valley and will want to leave. Thankfully, apart from a few small glitches that might occur, the majority of walk cycles are natural and accommodate for directions and crouching. Such cycles allow not only for the naturalism of the world to show but also help to set the atmosphere such as when sneaking through a dungeon avoiding enemies. While sneaking, the character is in a crouched position with their feet set shoulder length apart, because of this stance, they distribute their weight equally reducing the amount of pressure exerted on the floor or ground.
But, what would a fantasy world be without fire breathing dragons, giants, and other fantastical creatures? The very normal world we used Skyrim to escape from. Probably one of the most difficult feats to accomplish in a fantasy environment is to make a creature that does not exist believable. How would one even be able to film reference for a dragon attacking a village? At least with the mammoths, an animator could look at a mammoth skeleton then estimate how they would have moved and reference and elephant’s walk cycle. A giant’s walk cycle is very similar to a human’s which is given a greater sense of weight along with the giant shifting his weight in much more exaggerated way and much slower to give the effect of lumbering.
A creature such as dragon has to be built from the ground up including how it will move such as flying or walking on land. The dragon’s flight follows the rule of aerodynamic lift, where airflow is faster over one side of a surface, in this case the dragon’s wings, which results in an upward force that lifts the dragon into the air. Alternatively, the dragon can also adjust the angle of his wings to reverse the airflow across his wings to cause a downward force allowing him to land. Examples of this can be seen in the video below where the player character has encountered a dragon in combat where the dragon attacks from both the air and on ground.
While the dragon’s presence and weight can be felt when encountering them, especially when landing the whole screen shakes and buildings catch on fire. However, it is to be noted that when the dragons take off and land the ground around them, aside from snow and dirt flying up, does not react proportionately with the ground being torn up or a thatched roof caving in. This may not be immediately noticeable as the player’s main priority is to stay alive, they may be wondering how on earth the houses stay in such good shape whilst being burned and thrashed at by a giant dragon. If a dragon were to really land on the roof of a house, it would cave in due to the level of force the dragon is exerting by his landing.
In addition to the fantastical creatures that populate the land, the player also engages in impossible feats of combat, such as leaping onto a dragon’s head repeatedly stabbing it in the head or wielding powerful magic to heal allies and to incinerate foes. The appearance of magic often appears fluid, especially when it’s being directed at a specific target. As seen in the video below electrical, fire, and healing magic have the most fluid look as it travels from the caster to the target. The flowing appearance is similar to flowing gases or water being moved due to force as if in a stream or smoke being blown away by the wind. This is due to Bernoulli's Principle, if we can suppose that some sort of force is causing the magic to move in its intended direction due to low pressure surrounding it.
Now that we have seen how Skyrim functions as a believable world both in the realistic and the fantastic sense; we can talk about those silly glitches that take you out of the experience and break the laws of physics in silliest ways possible. Many of Skyrim’s most infamous glitches include flying mammoths, characters' feet mysteriously sinking into the ground, or corpses flying off into the sunset. Such occurrences have occurred in many people’s play-throughs, and many of these glitches were never found by Bethesda in their beta testings of the game. Other glitches occur when the player interacts with the world in a way Bethesda may not have anticipated and the game engine lacks a pre-calculated response such as a mod that introduces a new style of fighting or a new creature to ride like a horse. An example of this can be seen in the video below where the Chocobo Mounts and Followers Mod by gg77 from the Steam Workshop is used.
(glitch compilation video by HellOnWheels357)
While exploring the frigid land of Skyrim, you lose yourself in your adventures in the open world due to the way it functions as a realistic world. The movements of the characters and the way the player can interact with the world and how it reacts allows for a lifelike world to be immersed in. The realism of the world comes through allowing for the fantastic to shine without breaking the immersion. The movements of the characters and environment exhibit physics that mirror the real world in such a way that allow for the player to accept it as a realistic world which has elements of the fantastic. Aside from some glitches that either break the experience or simply look silly, as a whole, Skyrim has successfully displayed its physics for many fans to be able to lose themselves in a world of fire breathing dragons.
