Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
If you buy only one PC game from all of 2011, it should be The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Far in the future, when we look back at gaming this year from our dilithium-crystals-powered hoverchairs, we'll remember it first and foremost as the time we slew dragons and scattered bandits like bowling pins by shouting gibberish.
The enormous world of Skyrim is dense with memorable moments: That first dragon fight; climbing to the top of the land's tallest mountains; being attacked by a pack of sabercats on the road; learning a new shout that calls in a lightning storm or freezes enemies solid; getting smashed into orbit by a giant's club; stealing a guard's weapon right off of him; electrocuting a chicken and getting a whole town howling for your blood; finding a legendary weapon; crafting dragonbone armor... and on and on.
We may've seen this fantasy world of Bethesda's four times before, but the continent of Tamriel still has new and interesting things to show us. Skyrim is a game where even a dreaded courier quest, where someone asks you to carry a package to their relative two towns over for pocket change, is an opportunity for excitement, simply because it'll take you to areas of the vast world you may not have explored. Around every corner is a new dungeon to explore, a new monster to fight, or a new piece of loot that makes you that much stronger.
Is it perfect? Hell no. For starters, the UI is only barely usable. Combat isn't the deepest thing ever (though it does produce more than a few entertaining battles). Glitches are commonplace, and expose the seams where the hundreds of different systems operating under the hood meet, work together, and sometimes collide. Horses scoff at gravity, and putting a basket over a shop owner's head makes you the greatest thief who ever lived. For a week, an errant patch caused fire to hurt fire demons and dragons to fly backwards.
Yet there's something about it that keeps drawing us back in. Not only have the three of us each logged more than 100 hours in Skyrim in just two months since it's been out, but we're still itching to go back for more adventuring time. Once it had its hooks into us, it infected us with an itch that compels us to leave no stone unturned.
And Skyrim is just getting started. It has a bright future ahead of it, with inevitable DLC expansions (which Bethesda has indicated will be larger and meatier than most) and, of course, mods galore. Even though the official mod tools have yet to arrive, we've already seen a torrent of minor modifications further set the PC version apart from its console counterparts with high-definition textures and UI improvements, among a great many other useful tweaks and goofy tricks.
Not that sales numbers enter into our consideration of what our favorite game was, but it's worth noting that Skyrim has shattered records on Steam, with a peak of almost 300,000 concurrent players all roaming the land at once - and it has maintained that top spot for months. That's unheard of, and it means that likely millions of PC gamers have shared in this experience. That's a lot of watercooler stories about epic dragon battles and last-second saves by your companion. Even if Skyrim doesn't end up being your personal favorite game of the year (and, looking at the competition, we totally understand if it's not), being able to swap adventuring tales with your gamer friends makes it well worth playing.
Honorable Mentions: Portal 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Batman: Arkham City
