The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim celebrated its 15-year anniversary on November 11, 2026. Below, we look back at why it has endured for all that time.
It is my solemn duty to report that the first time someone booted up Skyrim was–brace yourself–15 years ago. I was 15 myself when I first took that infamously slow trip on the wagon toward my death-by-execution-turned-almost-death-by-dragon. Now in my 30s, Skyrim is still relevant. It sold 65 million copies. It is the most modded game on Nexus Mods, with some mods even becoming standalone games. It has inspired everything from Valheim to Avowed to Breath of the Wild. It’s so good, and so popular, that Bethesda has spent practically every year since release re-releasing it: for Switch, for VR, for the ‘Special Edition,’ for the ‘Anniversary Edition,’ spanning nine consoles across three entire generations.
I, like millions of other gamers, have put hundreds of hours into exploring the snowy reaches of Skyrim, demolishing draugr, and dodging every town guard who dares hold me accountable for my crimes. Skyrim is one of my most memorable and consistent gaming experiences. But here’s the thing: Some parts of Skyrim kind of suck.
The combat is pretty brainless; the cinematics are as wooden as a casket; the player’s choices are largely irrelevant, or are so obvious to make, they border on absurdity (looking at you, Paarthunax). Wrap that up in one of the most cumbersome UIs in the medium and add more bugs than a beehive, and it’s clear that this is not a perfect game. There is so much room for improvement that it’s kind of astounding that no one else has really made a game that feels like Skyrim.
The Witcher 3’s world is filled with fascinating world-building and interesting quests, Baldur’s Gate 3 is shaped by the player’s choices–both titanic and miniscule–and Elden Ring’s strategic combat makes a fight with a nameless grunt more thrilling than one of Skyrim’s awkwardly flying dragons. These are all better games than Skyrim–hell, I’d say even Dragon Age: Inquisition is better for its companions, who feel like people rather than pack mules that love to linger in doorways or in the line of fire. But I keep coming back to Skyrim, and I will continue to do so until Sentinel releases sometime in the next 15 years.
A big part of what makes Skyrim so alive, and so easily returnable after a decade and a half of superior game releases, is … Skyrim. That is to say, the province. The world of Skyrim is the perfect size for a video game. The 2010s were marred by a trend of bloated maps from AAA studios, all seeking the rush of being the biggest game out there while sacrificing depth. These Pacific-sized puddles pale when compared to Skyrim, with its snow-capped mountains (that you can see and climb, as Todd Howard helpfully pointed out), its gorgeous autumnal forests, serene lakes, and dozens of camps and caves with bad guys to kill and good treasure to loot. It’s big enough to wander in and notice things on your second, third, or eighth playthrough that you didn’t spot before, but small enough to feel purposeful and handcrafted.
The sight and sound of the world also helps: Skyrim has one of the most gorgeous soundtracks of the century, and though the graphics are dated, the art style has just enough fantastic whimsy to make the world as charming as ever. There’s no shortage of mods that change the graphics, and I often find the photorealism they provide loses some of the magic of the subtle frozen fairy tale Bethesda cooked up. Well, that and all the conspicuously shiny, yass-ified anime girls.
Speaking of mods, I’m always shocked to see that many of the most popular graphics overhauls include a third-person camera as the new default. Bethesda’s commitment to first-person is essential to me. The Witcher’s Novigrad is an amazing city to explore, but it can’t quite match the feeling of walking through Whiterun like I’m really there selling troll fat to Belethor and getting annoyed face-to-face by Nazeem.
First-person open-world games are surprisingly rare, and those that do dive in don’t hit in the same way that a Bethesda game does: Far Cry suffers from the “checking items of a list” map style made “popular” by Ubisoft, Dying Light is just about killing zombies, Kingdom Come: Deliverance lacks the spark of fantasy and the variety of enemies that come with it, and Avowed comes close but is too small in scope to captivate the way Skyrim does. Even Starfield doesn’t feel like a Bethesda world, with everything broken up by planet-hopping and repetitive overworlds; its biggest flaw is being a Bethesda game that doesn’t feel like a Bethesda world.
The longevity and legacy of Skyrim feels like it should be more of a lesson than it is. The game proved that an action-RPG doesn’t need to have interesting combat, or the ability to strategically develop a build, or impactful player decisions, or good cinematics, or memorable companions, or polish, to be seen as a landmark game that people still turn to four presidential elections later. The torch should have been passed a long time ago, but it’s clear that while many studios can certainly make a better fantasy RPG than Bethesda, no one can craft an immersive world quite like Bethesda can. Here’s hoping that Sentinel can recreate Skyrim’s magic–but not literally, as the magic system could use an overhaul.
