It’s been 12 years now since Bethesda Introduced its classic role-playing game. The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim The appeal seems endless, and as of 2016, the publisher announced that the game had sold an impressive 30 million copies.
You’d think that would mean that pretty much everyone has played it, and already owns it. But the game continued to impress. Even on brand new hardware. Yesterday, Valve announced that Skyrim was the 11th most played game on its handheld system in January 2023.
There are more modern games and re-releases ranked higher than Skyrim on the same list (including Elden Ring, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Stardew Valley, Hades, Red Dead Redemption 2, Persona 5 Royal, Cyberpunk 2077 and Grand Theft Auto 5), but 11th isn’t too bad for a game that’s entering its second decade at this point.
Especially considering that people are already on Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Playstation VR, Nintendo Switch, PC, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, or any sufficiently powerful mobile device.
And that’s it, the first month of 2023 is over – here’s a quick look at the top 20 January games on the Steam Deck, sorted by playtime.
what have you been playing pic.twitter.com/bpuLvTWF7g
— Steam Deck (@OnDeck) January 31, 2023
Impressively, the game has also outranked some of the biggest hits in recent years despite being previously available – Valheim, God of War, Disney’s Valley of Dreams, and Monster Hunter Rising are all in Skyrim. People just can’t get enough of this classic RPG, even after all these years. but why?
Well, first off, it’s one of the best open world games ever made. Packed with mysteries and unsolved mysteries, this game will captivate even the fiercest Internet sleuth over the years.
That’s before you get the fan support the game continues to receive: there are mods that allow you to play more like Elden Ring and make it look as good as the game that hasn’t been released yet.
And then there’s the heart of the whole thing: Like many Bethesda games, the main quest isn’t the star of the show. It’s everything you get here. It may lack some of the better role-playing game elements of its venerable predecessors like Morrowind and Oblivion, but the depth and breadth of the game as a whole is endlessly engaging. The main story more or less happens to other people, but depending on how you play – as a mage, bandit, assassin, vampire, or whatever – it can have such different properties that it feels like one Overall new game.
The world of Skyrim isn’t intimidatingly large by modern standards, but it weighs around 37 square miles—a depth that will surprise you if you grew up in some of the anemic open worlds of the past. reproduce in several generations.
Bethesda has a lot to prove in the coming months. Starfield is ready to “take over” the mantle Skyrim currently has – if all goes well. You’ll wish it would. The game has over 250,000 lines of dialogue (for what it’s worth, more than Skyrim and Fallout 4 combined), and the team working on it is more than twice the size of the team working on Fallout 76.
So it has things it needs to do well. But we’ll see if reality matches Bethesda’s optimism that it’s close to it sometime this year. In the meantime, here’s everything we know about Starfied so far.
