Preface: Skyrim's a very 'make your own fun' kind of game. Like a prettier but significantly more restrictive Minecraft. I'd never played a Bethesda Open World RPG before and while a lot of my misgivings towards their designs have ringed true, it's still turned out to be a fun way to pass the time.
Original Post: July '12
So let me tell you how my day has been:
I’m dealing with Riften at the moment (i.e. Skyrim’s Wretched Hive of Scum and Villiany and home of the fantastically retarded Thieves Guild Quest) and talked to the jarl about bounty work. It’s something I’ve been trying to get out of the habit of doing seeing as how I don’t need the cash and it’s just a grind quest, but occasional I’ll get lucky and be given a dragon to catch.
Such was the case this time.
I headed off to the Autumnsomething Tower to get the scaly bastard. Now the tower lay up against the southernmost mountain range in Skyrim and in an attempted to get a better vantage point, I climbed up the range and approached the Tower from the east, near Froki’s shack, if you know the place. From its coloring, I could tell it was an Elder Dragon, which I’d only just recently started dealing with. I’d battled only one before and it was…prolonged. The only approach I could see was going straight up the mountain at it and that did not look appealing. However there was a path leading up further into the mountains and appeared to bend in a manner that would bring me behind the tower and possibly allow a stealthier approach.
I headed through and as I got round the bend, I was greeted with massive nord arches that indicated a nord ruin nearby, but my compass showed nothing but the tower…and that made me nervous. I continued on.
Now sneaking forward cautiously, I entered an open area of snow with some nord grave…thing on the other end. Oh and two snow bears.
Alright lesson time! Y’know how in Zelda, they have these enemies that are exactly the same, but one’s more powerful because it’s blue instead of red? Skyrim has the same thing…only with snow. Now regular bears are bad enough cause they got thick fucking hides, hit like…well, bears, and they don’t give a shit about my lvl 100 sneaking and see me no matter what. Now I’m dealing with the same level of ‘fuck you, Imma bear’ and it just got bumped up a snowy notch…and there’s two of ‘em! I know the dragon I gotta fight is within ear shot and I don’t want to waste resources fighting these bastards, so I run right past them to the other side of the clearing…right into a dragon.
Really game? You’re really gonna pull this shit on me? Alright, I got animal empathy, but since I just used Kyne’s peace on the bears, I gotta wait for it to recharge. I see right in the middle of the path is one of those open nord grave sites that typically have treasure, an entrance to a dungeon, or a bad mutherfucker in ‘em. The compass rules out the possibility of a dungeon, so I cross my fingers and dive in. Guess what?
Suck a dick Skyrim! I’m sneaking when I drop down, but this Draugr Deathlord don’t give a shit! He spots me before he breaks out of his coffin! Eyes wide with incredulity at the shit luck I’ve been dealing with, I hop out the grave, run back to where I’d come from and used my now charged animal empathy shout to have the ice bears kick this guys ass…quite aware there’s still a pissed off dragon what needs killing.
The bears do indeed kick his ass with my help, with one falling in the process. However victory is extremely short lives as my animal empathy has run out, and I have a dragon still to deal wi—
…
FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU—
2nd Post
I’d never played an Elder Scrolls game prior to Skyrim and my first week or so was not a particularly entertaining trek.
Understand that my transition to the PC as a gaming platform was relatively late in coming, not until the 360/PS3 generation in fact. Prior to that, my experience with videogames was relegated largely to consoles and I’d only ever really played JRPGs during the SNES/PSX era and then lost interest. Beyond the vid’ja games however, I’d also never played a round of D’nD nor had the slightest clue regarding it’s mechanics, nor had I read any fantasy fiction beyond Tolkien.
All this to say that up until starting this game, I was almost completely ignorant of tropes and concepts that define the so-called Western RPG. The idea of an open-ended, customizable adventure was almost entirely alien to me on a pretty fundamental level. As a result, I spent that first week doing what everyone else in my position did:
I picked up every single thing not nailed down and spent all my time being over encumbered.
Grab ALL the Brooms!
This game quickly and strikingly exposed just how controlled the majority of my videogame playing experience had been. Never before had a videogame presented a world to me where an item would not have a necessary purpose at some point in the game, where a skill would not need to be honed to perfection in order to proceed, where a dungeon need not be crawled through right after finding it if no one told me to go there. After 20+ years of having a game be broken if it didn’t provide me with direction, it was a hard sell dealing with a game that had me slogging through alchemy, enchanting and smithing before realizing just because there was a tutorial about it, didn’t mean I needed to actual do it if I didn’t want to. Also, all the crap in my bag.
I can't even imagine what it's like for the Fallout heroes...
So now we come to the Dwemer. All this talk of picking up crap and being over encumbered…anyone who’s played the game knows where I’m going with this.
I dropped alchemy and enchanting since I wasn’t playing a magician, but I did get around to delving into smithing. This meant I had a tendency to pick up ore whenever I could, which could only be found in mines…except Dwemer metal. That could only be found from metal scraps that littered Dwemer ruins and man was there a lot of it to be found when you were in there! So much that you could easily smelt over a hundred ingots worth of Dwemer metal from just one dungeon. The problem was that it was really fucking heavy…
I honestly don’t know what it is about Dwemer metal, but I just can’t let it lie on the ground. I gotta pick all that shit up, even though I was able to kick that habit for nearly everything else. It’s gotten to the point where I avoid Dwemer ruins, just so I don’t have to deal with the problem and when I HAVE to go in them, it requires practically hours of prep while I figure out how I can get in there with the lightest setup for me and my companion, which I only ever now bring with me specifically for Dwemer runs. Otherwise, I’m a lone wolf baby!
…
Whelp, that’s it! I just needed to bitch about the dwarves cause the main quest now has me going in a Dwemer ruin and I’m all…
Understand that my transition to the PC as a gaming platform was relatively late in coming, not until the 360/PS3 generation in fact. Prior to that, my experience with videogames was relegated largely to consoles and I’d only ever really played JRPGs during the SNES/PSX era and then lost interest. Beyond the vid’ja games however, I’d also never played a round of D’nD nor had the slightest clue regarding it’s mechanics, nor had I read any fantasy fiction beyond Tolkien.
All this to say that up until starting this game, I was almost completely ignorant of tropes and concepts that define the so-called Western RPG. The idea of an open-ended, customizable adventure was almost entirely alien to me on a pretty fundamental level. As a result, I spent that first week doing what everyone else in my position did:
I picked up every single thing not nailed down and spent all my time being over encumbered.
Grab ALL the Brooms!
This game quickly and strikingly exposed just how controlled the majority of my videogame playing experience had been. Never before had a videogame presented a world to me where an item would not have a necessary purpose at some point in the game, where a skill would not need to be honed to perfection in order to proceed, where a dungeon need not be crawled through right after finding it if no one told me to go there. After 20+ years of having a game be broken if it didn’t provide me with direction, it was a hard sell dealing with a game that had me slogging through alchemy, enchanting and smithing before realizing just because there was a tutorial about it, didn’t mean I needed to actual do it if I didn’t want to. Also, all the crap in my bag.
I can't even imagine what it's like for the Fallout heroes...
So now we come to the Dwemer. All this talk of picking up crap and being over encumbered…anyone who’s played the game knows where I’m going with this.
I dropped alchemy and enchanting since I wasn’t playing a magician, but I did get around to delving into smithing. This meant I had a tendency to pick up ore whenever I could, which could only be found in mines…except Dwemer metal. That could only be found from metal scraps that littered Dwemer ruins and man was there a lot of it to be found when you were in there! So much that you could easily smelt over a hundred ingots worth of Dwemer metal from just one dungeon. The problem was that it was really fucking heavy…
I honestly don’t know what it is about Dwemer metal, but I just can’t let it lie on the ground. I gotta pick all that shit up, even though I was able to kick that habit for nearly everything else. It’s gotten to the point where I avoid Dwemer ruins, just so I don’t have to deal with the problem and when I HAVE to go in them, it requires practically hours of prep while I figure out how I can get in there with the lightest setup for me and my companion, which I only ever now bring with me specifically for Dwemer runs. Otherwise, I’m a lone wolf baby!
…
Whelp, that’s it! I just needed to bitch about the dwarves cause the main quest now has me going in a Dwemer ruin and I’m all…
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