Elder Scrolls 5 hands-on: How to be a complete bastard in Skyrim #2

I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's amazing what you can achieve by killing everybody. Bethesda would like us to believe that character development in the Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is dependent on doing quests - listening soberly while princes detail their problems, then tramping off to plumb the depths of some catacomb, save ravishing princesses from ravening dragons, etc, etc. Rubbish. All you need do to scale the game's Everest of perks and skills is throw fireballs at faces. Which faces, you ask? Don't be so bloody choosy.

Part 1 and Part 3 of our Elder Scrolls 5 hands-on series. Stop over here for an interview with lead artist Matt Carofano.

Heed the example of Toxic, enemy to all that is pleasant and agreeable. When we left her she'd more or less cleaned out "Tutorial Town" Riverwood, started a punch-up on Whiterun's outskirts and waged an overnight war on Skyrim's capital Solitude, leaving dozens of guardsmen dead and several horseys with agonising bottoms. Save for a few fleeting exchanges, usually along the lines of "Halt in the name of the law AIEEEE", she'd steered clear of conversation with the realm's inhabitants, notable or otherwise. She'd been hacked to bits several times in the process, of course, but death in Skyrim is no biggie, thanks to regular auto-saving.

Skyrim perks: the wages of sin

And the pay-off? Several full suits of guard armour, including a nifty red shield with a white spiral design, a couple of steel maces, a bow and arrows, a wicked double-handed Greatsword, a horned helmet, a modest collection of Soul gems, magic rings and other trinkets, loads of cash, assorted foodstuffs, five pairs of soft velvet boots and enough alcohol to drown a sperm whale. I'd also levelled up a half-dozen times and made significant in-roads on the Two-Handed, Destruction and Heavy Armour perk trees.

It's said that all that's needed for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing. Actually all that's required is for massacring the innocent to generate loads of XP. Building a great menu system helps too. Skyrim's interface is a beauty, swapping Oblivion's clunky pseudo-parchment vibe for something more redolent of a modern console dashboard, all dark glass backdrop and clam-shelled inventories. The perk system is a bit on the fussy side: it takes the form of a 3D star map, with constellations for each perk tree. Still, better some impromptu interfacial space opera than a heap of brown-scale tables and curly fonts.

So where were we? Ah yes, we were galloping away from Solitude with the garrison in pursuit. Damn those archers. And damn these pop-in guardsmen reinforcements too, cluttering up the nice tidy path with their soon-to-be corpses. The capital's defenders having given up the chase, there was time to dismount and show their insolent wandering comrades the business end of a charging Greatsword execution. Following said Greatsword execution, there was also time to giggle hysterically till one of Bethesda's PR chaps asked me to stop.