There was this gameplay video of Skyrim doing the rounds after E3 earlier this year. The game's director, Todd Howard, walks us through twenty minutes of beautiful scenery, meaty combat and mediative stealth, dual-wielded spells, friendly giants and, of course, a fire-breathing, ground-shattering dragon. Really, the video didn't show that much we haven't already heard about. In a new Elder Scrolls game, most of these features are just the obvious next step for the series. But regardless, this video helped to crown Skyrim as my most utterly longed-for game of the year.

It has nothing to do with what Howard is doing with his Nordic character. It has nothing to do with the enhanced visuals, the improved combat, or the more intricate stealth. Neither does it have anything to do with that dragon, which I admit I still have trouble believing is representative of a truly procedural species. No, what hooked me with this video was the horizon.

Behind the wolves, bandits, and dragons are trees, rivers, and, off in the distance, mountains. While Howard plays through his carefully staged battles precisely as he would have rehearsed in order to show off Skyrim's various systems, my eyes are drawn to the distance. I look over the trees of past the giant's shoulder, focusing on the corners of Howard's vision, and I think, "One day I will stand there."

It's an obvious statement, as anyone familiar with Bethesda's particular ilk of the role-playing genre will know. Bethesda's Elder Scrolls and Fallout games are classical examples of spatial stories, where the story is embedded in the world itself and the player discovers it by threading a path through its towns, valleys, rivers, and mountains. You don't get told a story by Bethesda, you have to go find it.

There is a consistency to Bethesda's worlds that give them a soul. In Morrowind, the third Elder Scrolls game, if a character needs you to go somewhere, they won't just put a marker on your HUD but will give you directions along the lines of "follow the river until you get to the tall tree then turn left past the cave and continue until you see that big stone." Then you would go there and, sure enough, that is what the world would look like. These open worlds don't feel like game levels; they feel like places.

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Part One of the 20 minute E3 walkthrough.
Of course, over the hundreds of hours I inevitably spend with each Bethesda title, I eventually grow familiar with their worlds. I learn the names of towns and regions. I discover the quickest, easiest route to get up this mountain or out from that fjord. I know which merchants will give me the best deal and which will try to rip me off. When this happens, the games continue to be fun, of course, but nothing they offer can hope to match the sensation of those early hours: that sensation of being somewhere new, somewhere foreign, somewhere alien. That sense of never before having been where you are now but knowing that it is now your home and after a few all-night sessions with the game, you will know it like the back of your hand.

One of my most memorable gaming memories is when I left Vault 101 for the first time in Fallout 3 and, as the blinding glare of the sunlight faded, I looked out over The Capital Wasteland. I just stood there for at least a minute and did nothing but gaze. Certainly, part of me was taking in the vastness of the devastation, the grimness of the landscape. But mostly I was thinking, "One day I will know all of this." I looked at the remains of the Washington Monument, peaking out of the horizon. One day I would not just be there, but I would be everywhere between here and there.

I play Bethesda games like a cartographer. I want to see everywhere. I want to turn over every stone in every dungeon just to see what story Bethesda put underneath it. I want to go to that town that travelling merchant told me about, or that I saw written on the signpost, or scrawled in the bandit's note. But more than that, I want to see every single thing between where I am and where that town is. The beauty of these games lies in the hours before you decide to just quick-travel to your destination, when it is still about the journey.

But it is a charm that eventually, inevitably must fade. As I explore these worlds, as I draw mental maps of them through my journey, I become familiar with them. Nowadays when I play Fallout 3 and walk towards Megaton to sell all my scrap metal and appropriated plasma guns, I walk through the ruins of Springvale and look up at the ‘scenic lookout' where I first stood after exiting Vault 101. How alien The Capital Wasteland was to me then! How exotic! How impossible it seemed to me then that I would be as comfortable in it as I am now.

It's only ever a temporary sensation, kind of like that particular smell a new game's case has that first time you open it but not the second time. That overwhelming sense of being somewhere new has to fade.

And that is why I can hardly wait for Skyrim. More than an open world, it is a new open world. The mountains on the horizon? That town Howard was heading to before he decided to attack those giants? I have never been there. I don't know what is underneath them or atop them. I don't even know where they are in the world or how to get to them! But I am going to. One day soon I will walk down that very path Howard walks down, and I will know where I am in my world. Heck, I will leave the path and just wander off into the forest. I will know the names of the flowers, of the farm peaking through the trees, of the churning white river flowing past.

It won't last. It can't last. There will come a day when all these alien, foreign, exotic places in the video will be as familiar to me as the path from Vivec City to Balmora in Morrowind. I doubt I will ever start a second new game of Skyrim once I have discovered all the places over a few hundred hours with my first. Sure, I would be able to do new quests and moves, but the places will be the same. The magic will be depleted.

And when that time comes, I will begin desperately awaiting the next massive, cohesive, thorough fictional world, be in Elder Scrolls 6 , Fallout 4 , or Grand Theft Auto 5. But for now, I cannot wait to climb that mountain, to swim in that river, to learn their names, to understand their relationship to the world around them, to draw a mental map of Skyrim with my character's footsteps across its realms.