107 Skyrim Facts YOU Should KNOW | The Leaderboard

there's no denying the impacts that Bethesda Studios has had on the gaming world they're one of the few video game companies that can proudly say they defined what an open-world game could accomplish one of their most beloved games of all time skyrim proved this fact even more so in gaming's last generation of consoles further solidifying Bethesda's legacy in the video game industry and the RPG genre as a whole hi i'm jacob with the leaderboard and i'm here to give you the detailed scoop on the elderscrolls v skyrim grab your sword pour some Mead and install some mods because this is 107 facts about the elderscrolls v skyrim let's get started [Music] Skyrim is the fifth main entry in the open-world RPG series the Elder Scrolls which is developed by Bethesda Game Studios the series was primarily developed by the man the myth the legend himself Todd Howard who is also very well known for his work on the Fallout series from the very beginning Howard was interested in videogames math and Dungeons & Dragons he asked his parents to get him an apple too so he could quote develop his brain further but he secretly wanted to use it to make video games Howard loves playing video games endlessly as a kid but there was one game that stood out to him the most wizardry it was the first game that resonated with Howard when it came to an RPG from then on he knew that was how RPGs should be made persistence and initiative pays off just ask Todd while playing Bethesda's Wayne Gretzky hockey free which he loved Howard noticed the studio's address was printed on the game's box so he went to their office to ask them to hire him they politely declined he eventually joined a smaller game studio which allowed him to go to the Consumer Electronics Show and other Expos where he could further bug Bethesda eventually they finally agreed to hire him Howard actually had the chance to create a game of Thrones video game the Fez de was approached in the early 2000s to make a game based off the books way before the show came to be but they ultimately declined the offer the main reason they were in the midst of developing their own fantasy world and preferred this rather than being limited in what they were able to create the Elder Scrolls didn't actually start as an open-world game not entirely anyway the first game in the entry the Elder Scrolls arena was a gladiatorial combat game which slowly evolved by adding maps outside the arena the players could explore and interact with this would eventually set the foundation for the Elder Scrolls series Howard loves what arena was able to do for the Elder Scrolls series it's one of his favorite games and Howard said it's probably because he didn't work on it so he was able to see it in a different light he also loved the way the game presented how big and open the world map could be Howard's main approach when thinking of new ideas for a game is how they can satisfy a player's fantasy he wanted the Elder Scrolls games to feel like his nostalgic memories of Dungeons and Dragons wear anything you want could be possible since there's a huge gap between each installment of the Elder Scrolls series Howard aims to reboot the feeling of each new game the core concepts in each of the Elder Scrolls games are always there but how they're presented and how the game looks and feels is always different from the previous entry the development team had a rather simple but effective work method they stood in front of a trusty whiteboard in the conference room and fleshed out ideas this usually brought better work and the meetings ended up being pretty brief as well at the Bethesda office during development the team had a giant dry erase sticker of the world map it allowed the team to chart out areas of the map that had already been developed plus it's just super cool to have a fantasy knife on your office wall the office also had a giant board of concept art to keep track of what was already designed for the game during development including the different kinds of meat the animals produced a picture of Bob Ross was also on the board perhaps the legendary painter is in the game somewhere well ok it's probably just because he makes gorgeous landscapes but Skyrim does too so clearly the motivation worked to take immersion to the next level but ESDA wanted to fine tune their animation to make every NPC feel real between NPCs and enemies alone there are thousands upon thousands of animations just doing one animation would wipe me out so I can only conclude that Bethesda exclusively employs robots one of the biggest changes in Skyrim's animation was the ability to actually view your character in third-person without the feeling of crushing disappointment but ESDA has almost always allowed their games to be played in third-person but the animation was never well quite the best for Skyrim how I've wanted to focus on how the player character moved in third-person since he knew fans loved playing in that mode so he made it a key focus in the animation process when developing enemies for the game Howard wanted every race and species to feel unique and interact with the world in their own way not everything in the world is meant to attack you right on site some enemies are extremely passive like mammoths or Giants and will only attack the player if they're attacked first and if it's early in the game and you provoke a giant you'll get absolutely wrecked and have no one to blame but yourself Howard believes that the dialogue and voice lines for NPCs no matter how long or short they may be are the most important he believes that a line of dialogue leaves an impression on a player and helps make the NPC's feel more real one of the biggest complaints that Bethesda faced during the previous Elder Scrolls game Oblivion's release was the lack of voice actors oblivion only had about 12 voice actors in total Skyrim beefed up the cast including over 70 voice actors doing over 110 rolls the voice recording process was pretty intense for Bethesda overall the recording sessions took over four weeks and that was with three studios simultaneously recording with different actors Todd Howard tried not to fanboy too much but there was one actor in Skyrim that he was absolutely giddy about working with Christopher Plummer who you may remember from A Beautiful Mind The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or The Sound of Music it was a dream of Howard's to work with the actor and he finally got the chance to in Skyrim Jim Cummings the iconic voice of a bazillion cartoon characters is also in Skyrim he's done the voice of Winnie the Pooh Tigger and the Tasmanian Devil just to name an incredibly select few in Skyrim he voiced bent 10 year of stoon Donal and many more characters you might recognize another voice in this game as well Charles Martin a who also voices none other than Super Mario himself provided the voice of the mighty partha NOx whoa Wow I'm like really bad a Mario impression it's the little details that matter in Skyrim after a dragon is slayed players can see the ashes fly into the sky if players pause the game and look at the world map during this the ashes will show up as a small blip on the world map since the Elder Scrolls 3 morrowind came out during the tail end of the release of the Lord of the Rings films Howard believes the movies helps people get more into fantasy especially when looking at the increase in sales oblivion had in comparison to its predecessor when all was said and done while the Elder Scrolls series takes a lot from standard fantasy Lord the development team wanted to change things up a bit in Skyrim dragons now just breathe fire they also have an ancient language and can do various other things such as breathe ice or even stop time when designing Skyrim how would one of the players to feel comfortable with the universe on a surface level he knew the cities in the game would feel like standard fantasy towns but if gamers were willing to dig a little deeper they would find a whole new sense of wonder the biggest design choice for Skyrim was settling on a tone for how the world would feel the player's character was not meant to feel defined or pre-chosen in any way and instead the team tried to design how players would feel in the world and how their character belongs in it Howard feels that the world in the atmosphere in Skyrim is a character of its own and the player is just another person in this world even if they are the Dragonborn for Bethesda there was never a question about making a fifth Elder Scrolls game the only challenge they had was how they could outdo themselves for oblivion and what could be different I wonder if they're taking the same thought process I'm applying it to dare I say a 6-game the team definitely outdid themselves in creating a game that was bigger than anything that came before it for example while fallout 3 only has 31 quests Skyrim has 244 of them in case you were wondering how people are still playing after 5 years the team was excited to jump into Skyrim after finishing fallout 3 the main reason being that the art team could use more vibrant colors and not have the world filled bleak and depressing the way a post-apocalyptic setting does they especially love that they could finally use the color green again Kurt Kuhlman one of the lead designers stated they wanted to make Skyrim because of the lore he loved how much it had developed after oblivion and the team wanted to expand on that lore in as of yet unexplored parts of the continent of Tamriel Bethesda felt like oblivion had many fantasy elements woven into a single location and said that it tried to be a little bit of everything but for Skyrim they wanted the world to feel less peaceful and bring in a more Viking centric tone to the game the beginning of each Elder Scrolls game always starts the same and Skyrim is no exception you are a prisoner but as the does this because they want the players character to have no backstory or any type of connection to the world that way the character can become whoever the player wants them to be I don't know about all of you but I'm quite the thief but like a good one who doesn't get captured or held prisoner a huge change for the game mechanics was the removal of the class-based system in Skyrim the developers wanted players to feel like they could fully control what their character does as a person the more you do something the better you are at it now you could grow within the game in any way you could imagine but that's the new that Dragons would be a key focal point in Skyrim early on in development the Elder Scrolls series never had dragons aside from one in the Elder Scrolls adventures Red Guard that is until Skyrim the first point established when developing Skyrim was that it needed dragons however Bethesda didn't want the Dragons to feel cliched or rushed in any way they wanted them to feel familiar but they also wanted to go beyond that the key concept that makes the Dragons and Skyrim feel so unique is that they become characters in the game itself when it comes to animating these majestic beasts because the one of the dragons to move in two types of ways they wanted the dragons to feel royal as they fly so they studied the way that Eagle soared through the air however when dragons were on the ground they wanted them to feel very reptilian primal and brutal the dragon language started with a challenging request from Todd Howard he asked the lead writer Emel Pagliarulo to write a song in the Dragon language that rhymes with the Skyrim theme song and that still makes sense when translated to English not to mention that it still had to rhyme in English and fit the Skyrim theme song as well challenge is an understatement that sounds like an impossible list of demands Pagliarulo also wrote the infamous took an arrow to the knee line in the game howard one of the guards to feel more human and relatable and be seen as vulnerable the lion does achieve that but it also unintentionally created a whole meal I guess we all see a little bit of ourselves in arrow to the knee guard and honestly it doesn't get much more human or relatable than that the opening theme song sounds like it was sung by an army of Vikings but there actually weren't that many people singing only thirty people sang the Skyrim theme but while they did their recordings they would do free passes on each verse to make it sound like there were 90 people singing the song the dragon language may sound poetic and dramatic to players and there's a reason why Pagliarulo found recordings of Vale wolf in Old English and cited them as being one of the biggest inspirations in developing the dragon language the actual written dragon language on the walls in the game is meant to look scratched up and uneven this is because it was the Dragons themselves who etched their language onto the walls and if you had to use your own claws to drawn to stone you probably wouldn't have the prettiest handwriting either the mine is even pretty to begin with when developing the combat the choice to have the camera zoom out into third-person view during executions was an obvious choice of a team they wanted the player to have that badass moment and they also wanted to show the power that the player has in this world the camera shift had some goofy in-house names during development some of the early names were bio lens and cynical until the team eventually landed on good old killcam one of the biggest shifts in combat for Skyrim was the ability to dual wield weapons and spells together it was a first in the series and Howard wanted Skyrim to live up to the mantra that you are who you choose to play and not limit the players experience in any way in the early stages of developing combat developers wanted the magic in the game to leave an impact they wanted magic duels in the game to feel heavy and right with the technology at the time it allowed them to have magic work in better ways like aiming fire on the ground and having enemies walk through it the sound design team debated on whether or not having sound effects was over-the-top they ultimately went the hollywood route and had weapons filled visceral when they were unshaved the hardest part of the sound design process for the team was making the magic spell sound right oblivion didn't actually have dedicated level designers for each dungeon rather the development team would reuse many assets which eventually made dungeon feel repetitive for Skyrim the team had dedicated level designers who work to make each dungeon feel not just unique but also organic and lived in there are a lot of interactive areas in Skyrim in fact there are so many that the developers don't even know the exact amount they've approximated that there are at least 300 interactive areas in the game including things like dungeons and fortresses Bethesda didn't want a lot of dungeons just for the sake of having dungeons they wanted each one to tell the unique story be it through quest salute or sometimes just having the atmosphere to tell a story without saying a word really give that sense of adventure Skyrim fans are pretty hard core on Skyrim's launch date two parents named their newborn child Dovahkiin Tom Keller Meyer that says the love the gesture so much that the family now receives Bethesda games for life however as of yet there's no word on whether young dov'è actually is the Dragonborn maybe he is the Dragonborn and he just doesn't know it yet the Fez DES has no shortage of fans who adore their games endlessly player erequest will go down as one of the biggest oblivion fans of all time through the make-a-wish Foundation Eric was able to have an in-depth tour of the Bethesda office sadly Eric passed away in 2011 due to cancer he was immortalized in Skyrim as the character Eric the Slayer one of the most dedicated Skyrim fans of someone you may not expect an 80 year old grandma by the name Shirley curry absolutely loved Skyrim and does Let's Plays of it on her YouTube channel she actually has over 300 videos on Skyrim and continues to upload on a regular basis the Fez des seems to be a big fan of the Minecraft series as they included a little Easter egg as a shout-out to notch in Skyrim players can travel to the highest peak the throat of the world and if they can make it to the very top they'll be rewarded with none other than the notched pickaxe there are also a few or veins surrounding it get climbing and get my name Luke Skywalker can also be found in the game well what appears to be his remains anyway if the player travels to bleep coast cave and defeats all the enemies who just so happened to resemble another white snow monster from a certain movie franchise they'll find a skeleton hanging from ice with a glowing green sword on the ground hmm sounds like a reference to a certain saber used by a certain person doesn't seem like this guy was as fortunate as Luke though if the world of Skyrim isn't exciting enough there's also the option to play a game within a game through a book in the game in Whiterun players can find a book titled cold and the dragon an adventure for nord boys the item is an actual choose your own adventure book and a fun distraction to have in the game try it out yourself and see if you can get a happy ending it's surprisingly difficult for people who want a real challenge players should check out a jail that can easily be missed called the chill it can be found far northwest of the college of winterhold and is meant to hold the most hardcore of mages which is why it's hidden away on top of that is guarded by multiple frost atra knocks bars and skyrim are apparently big fans of the elder scrolls - Daggerfall at the winking Skeever in in solitude the bards will sometimes play a melody that is the same one played in shops in Daggerfall draugar don't conform to gender norms by which we mean draggers funds are random and don't go through any type of filter that means a dragger can spawn with a female torso yet also have a full-fledged beard it's possible to be the ultimate thief in Skyrim and steal items right in front of an NPC face and they won't even care well kind of there's a slight glitch where you can place a pot or a basket over an NPCs face loot their surroundings and they'll be none the wiser maybe when you throw basket on their head they think it's nighttime and just fall asleep right there if you feel like being generous and want to give back to the poor you'll be truly blessed if the player gives a beggar even one gold coin the gift of charity will be activated this grants a temporary increase to the speech skill after being a good soul and donating one coin to the homeless why not get a house 100% for free once you agree to buy a house exit the conversation and turn immediately to a wardrobe or similar storage unit quickly store your gold in the unit and boom you'll get the house key and your gold will still be in the storage container for you to recollect Daedric weapons in general some of the best in Skyrim it can be difficult to keep a healthy supply of Daedric arrows but this nifty glitch can remedy that if you go to any guard who's shooting arrows as target practice place one Daedric arrow on them and steal all their steal arrows you can do this while they're sleeping if you can't feel equipped items they'll keep shooting endless arrows except now all of them are Daedric there's a headless horseman in Skyrim and it's definitely not creepy at all a headless horseman will ride randomly throughout the world of Skyrim and if the player follows him they will eventually end up at hammer ears rest where a bunch of undead soldiers ambushed the player there's really no benefit to it since the chest that Hamm beers rest doesn't hold anything great but you do get to follow around a creepy ghost and that makes any game automatically better the developers endearingly think of the smaller pieces of the game's environment as clutter as there's so much in Skyrim that players can interact with and whatever you choose to do can affect you in some form or another for instance you can pick flowers and eat them and they'll have some sort of effect have you ever wondered where dead NPCs go it's not heaven or hell it's a really weird purple and green room on PC if the player types in the console command player moved to zero zero zero A to C 94 they'll be teleported to a scary room that just holds the NPCs who either get lost or have died in the world it's pretty terrifying it's definitely creepier than the headless horseman have a disease and don't want your premium to go up on your insurance this nifty trick will solve that the Silver Hand or a group in the game that hate werewolves and diseases in general if you pickpocket or loot their bodies they will always have either a cure disease potion or the ingredients to make one they must be the ultimate germaphobes of Skyrim I feel like I'd get along with them are the dragons in the open outside land of Skyrim just too boring well if you go to black reach look for a bright light fixture hanging from the ceiling and use the unrelenting force shout a dragon will appear out of nowhere it doesn't appear to be any type of special boss just another cool dragon to take down swimming can be tiresome and boring in Skyrim so you know what would make it cooler horses at full speed that's what there's a glitch where if the player dismounts a horse in the water and immediately mounts it again the horse will gallop at full speed in the water you've heard of dragon boats they don't hold the candle to my horse boat having trouble killing a force swarm Bryer heart the little tip might help if you pickpocket a forsworn briar heart and loot their heart they will die instantly no medical school or PhD required plus it will be like that scene in Temple of Doom engine of Markarth is apparently a big fan of pac-man if you break into his house and search around you can come across a wheel of cheese on his shelf as laid out to look like pac-man eating tiny little dot to this day Skyrim is still a marvel to look at and fans love taking screenshots of various vistas in the DLC expansion Dragonborn players can traverse the highest peaks on soul Simon look at some breathtaking views the good news is once the player reaches these mountain peaks the locations can be fast traveled to later dragons are pretty rad and riding on dragons is super rad but riding on a dragon that can't die might be the raddest thing ever after gaining the shout to summon dragons in the Dragonborn DLC players can travel to the top of the throat of the world and summon a dragon the best thing about summoning a dragon the immortal dragon is an important NPC that will not turn on you that is true loyalty it's like a dog only a dragon after being able to summon the dragon it only makes sense to want to fight one of the toughest enemies in the game once a player reaches level 80 the ebony warrior will eventually walk up to you and ask for a duel to the death but beware the ebony warrior isn't like your normal bandit who sees you decked out in your Daedric gear and it's like oh yeah well my wooden club can take you on the ebony warrior has some of the best equipment in the game oh and he can also do dragon chefs as well so good luck if the ebony warrior isn't enough then how about the Reaper himself in the dawn guard DLC players get the chance to go head to head with the Reaper in soul Charon their chests scattered throughout the container Reaper sheron's they're needed to summon the Reaper in his lair and while he may not be as tough as other enemies like car stag he can still pack a mean punch speaking of car stag if the ebony warrior and the Reaper aren't tough enough then maybe this secret boss might do the trick kar stag is part of the Dragonborn DLC but he is not part of any quest if the player travels the Glacial cave in Sultan Steel's car stag skull from the cave travels to Castle car stag and puts the skull on the throne then well car stag will appear and he will not be happy come stag is easily one of the toughest bosses in the game so be ready for a fight if you defeat him you'll have the ability to summon him three times have you ever wanted to have an excuse to play Skyrim at school well you just might have that chance Rice University in Houston Texas used Skyrim as a way to teach their students about Scandinavian culture one of the biggest features of Skyrim is the ability to modify the game however you see fit here are four of our favorites the first one is by mater this who enabled the book to become the entire B movie script you like jazz Skyrim would never want to be outdone by The Legend of Zelda breath of the wild so why not mod the world to be more Zelda II modder awesome and ER thought just that and recreated the temple of time in Skyrim right down to actually being able to walk up and pick up the Master Sword Skyrim can be a pretty violent game so modern train whiz decided to make it more kid-friendly by creating the mod really useful dragons which you guessed it turns all of the dragons into various Thomas the Tank Engine characters this mod is truly a sight to behold just as Bethesda intended probably the most immersive mod of all time everyone needs a companion in Skyrim and who doesn't love one that wears jean shorts due to the heroics of modern men well x98 you too can have the legend himself Crash Bandicoot as a follower Todd Howard never specifically dedicates time when it comes to the modding abilities for the games he works on but he feels and develops a unique community since the followed and Elder Scrolls games are all single-player aside from the Elder Scrolls online he believes that the modders have made their own community that replicates the multiplayer experience Howard also believes that modding allows for the games to live on far longer than they should in terms of being relevant do you agree Skyrim still feels pretty relevant to us I might even go start a new character after doing this voice over the elderscrolls v Skyrim was released on November 11th 2011 that's 11-11-11 a pretty epic release date if you remember our Game of Thrones facts from earlier you might also have realized that this is seven months after HBO premiered the first episode when it was released Skyrim won a surplus of Game of the Year awards and to this day has a huge community supporting it Skyrim has received universal praise from almost every major gaming outlet it currently holds a 96 on Metacritic for the Xbox 360 version which was the most reviewed version of the game one of the biggest reviews that Skyrim got was from Famitsu that means who scores their games on a 10 10 10 10 scale which means for different people review a game and give out their own 10 out of 10 score well Skyrim was the first Western game to ever get a perfect 40 from Famitsu not too shabby Todd Skyrim didn't do too bad in actual sales either it's in the list of top 20 games sold of all time with an impressive 20 million units sold it's one of the few Western games to crack this list with some others being Grand Theft Auto 5 and minecraft believe it or not Skyrim is Bethesda's second highest selling game of all time it was eventually dethroned of its highest selling title when fallout 4 was released which isn't too bad of the game to be a runner-up - in October of 2016 Bethesda announced Skyrim special edition this version is an upscaled version of Skyrim for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox one that comes with all of the DLC and added mod support Skyrim was also announced for Nintendo's newest console the switch this will be the first bethesda game to ever be on a Nintendo platform while Howard had high hopes for the game he never expected it to do as well as it did in an interview with polygon he admitted that he couldn't pinpoint one reason why it did so well but he knew it was highly popular when so many other media outlets began referencing it so if you didn't figure by now Howard is pretty good at making video games from Morrowind oblivion fallout 3 to Skyrim he led the developers and all of these titles won Game of the Year awards to one degree or another another thing you might have noticed is bethesda has a thing for sweet rolls at least in their games in Skyrim the guards sometimes say let me guess someone stole your sweet roll sweet rolls also appear in the Fallout franchise though skyrim is the fifth installment in series it actually doesn't have the biggest map of all the Elder Scrolls games which one does that would be the Elder Scrolls 2 Daggerfall with a whopping sixty-two thousand three hundred and ninety four square miles that's four thousand times bigger than the Skyrim map there are ten playable races in Skyrim they are Ultima also called high elves Argonian bosmer also called wood elves Breton dunmer also called dark elves Imperial Khajiit Nord orzammar also called orcs guard there are also two other races but they're unplayable the Falmer who used to be snow elves and the dwarves or Dwemer the translation of Dwemer is beef elves there are three DLC add-ons available for Skyrim the Elder Scrolls 5 Dawnguard the Elder Scrolls 5 heart fire and the Elder Scrolls 5 Dragonborn each was initially released as a timed xbox 360 exclusive before becoming available on all other platforms Skyrim uses the creation engine a new engine designed by Bethesda it allows for advanced graphics variable environments and uneven weather effects that more realistically affect the players and their obstacles alas Elder Scrolls 6 has not been announced or set for release eventually development will happen for the game but they're currently focusing on other large projects first but we're willing to wait once again I'm Jacob and thanks for watching 107 facts about the elderscrolls v Skyrim did we miss anything which title in the series is your favorite comment below and let us know we have new videos dropping every week so let us know what game you want us to cover next don't forget to click the little bell icon to become part of our notification squad and if you like getting more from your games subscribe to the leader board where we help you game smarter [Music]

Channel: The Leaderboard

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Keywords: 107 Skyrim Facts, 107 skyrim, skyrim facts, Skyrim, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls Skyrim, skyrim, skyrim secrets, skyrim mods, dragonborn, Bethesda, skyrim lore, video games, gameplay, gaming, 107 facts, eso, the leaderboard, rpg

Id: onERYcTI_L8

Length: 26min 0sec (1560 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 08 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Fargoth_took_my_ring]

Pretty sure that's the mod 'Magic Duel'

Never used it, but I've seen footage around.