Skyrim is a game that you cannot avoid. It's available on damn near everything. It's not a matter of if you'll play Skyrim, it's a matter of when. As far as I can tell, this must be some rite of passage, and my time has finally come. Enter H'kage, a female Khajiit who slices and dices, strikes from the shadows, and will rob you blind if given the chance. This game brought out my inner kleptomaniac AND hoarder. Neither of those things are good for the game's save file size, but we'll get to that problem in a while. For now, it's time to embrace Bethesda's masterpiece.
The moment you escape the opening, you can go anywhere you please. See that mountain? There's probably a proper path up it somewhere, but this is Skyrim! Strafe your face up against any incline while mashing the jump button, you'll be surprised at the places you can reach. A new icon pops up on your compass? Time to take a leisurely stroll through the majestic, mountainous region of Tamriel, breathtaking from any angle. But what does one do in Skyrim? Well, it's a lot of fighting. Skyrim's combat feels like the equivalent of smashing action figures against each other, and not in the fun imaginative sense; I mean the combat truly feels like wildly smashing plastic figures against themselves. Granted, melee isn't nearly the only option at your disposal. Magic attacks didn't really do anything for me, but the healing was always nice to have on hand. A good way to tank damage if stabbing unaware bandits in the back with a dagger didn't work out.
Even if the combat is limp, my greatest takeaway from Skyrim is its sidequests. Despite the fact that I don't remember the names or faces of the people who sent me on my various quests, Skyrim did a damn good job at making the journey the memorable part, and not the destination. Almost every single cave and village I came across had something unique to experience. Sometimes I'd stumble into the lair of an alchemist breeding a nuclear spider army, other times I would find a guy pretending to be a ghost in a crypt. These little self-contained stories provide the best kind of tales to share with your friends, especially if it leads to some cool items. Needless to say, this made it all the more jarring that I thought the main quest was nothing special.
There you are, playing your high fantasy open-world game, when all of a sudden, you're the Dragonborn. You didn't ask for this. You didn't choose this, and yet, here we are. I thought the main questline of Skyrim to be boooooriiiiing. I think most of my disinterest stems from a lack of agency. Being the Dragonborn is cool enough, but it doesn't really play into anything. I just am the Dragonborn, whether I like it or not. None of your choices on the main path matter, all these important events kinda just happen around you. Fighting dragons and collecting shouts is cool, but it's not that necessary, and I rarely used them. Also, screw the Blades. I don't know why they're so pissy about the Shoutmasters on the mountain, and I am NOT killing one of the only interesting characters in the whole narrative. When people complain to the point of modding in the option to simply say "no", I think the writers officially lost the plot. I made a point to play through the main story quests before my save file got too big and whoops, I can't hide this problem any longer.
Yeah, I played Skyrim on the PS3, and as it turns out, PS3 Skyrim is arguably the worst version of the game. I got the game for Christmas, so I didn't really have a say in my platform of choice, but I'd probably have ended up getting it on PS3 just to know how people experienced Skyrim back in 2011, in its purest, unmodded form. From my point of view, Skyrim is Skyrim is Skyrim, minus the PC version, because people have modded that game to the moon and back, and I didn't want that clouding my opinion of the game. It's not "literally unplayable" on PS3, but your experience is on a time limit of sorts. Your save file size increases as you discover locations, take on more quests, and hoard more items. As your save grows bigger, load times take longer, and the game becomes buggier. Have you ever been swimming, and suddenly you stop swimming, and then you drop to the bottom and can't reach the surface? That's what actual nightmares are like, and this happened to me late in my playthrough! There were points where I passed up on exploring optional locations because I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to fulfill my self-assigned goal of finishing the main quest before the game slapped me with an infamous 10-minute loading screen or some game-breaking bugs. I never reached that point, but 11MB+ is nothing to scoff at.
Frankly, I would love to play Skyrim forever. I played it for a few weeks straight, only to feel a guilty sense of procrastination wash over me. I would play it more if I didn't set myself the "beat the main story quests" goal (and even then I got most of the trophies anyways, whoops), but I have other games I want to play. Todd will take hold of me again some other day...it's only a matter of time.
The moment you escape the opening, you can go anywhere you please. See that mountain? There's probably a proper path up it somewhere, but this is Skyrim! Strafe your face up against any incline while mashing the jump button, you'll be surprised at the places you can reach. A new icon pops up on your compass? Time to take a leisurely stroll through the majestic, mountainous region of Tamriel, breathtaking from any angle. But what does one do in Skyrim? Well, it's a lot of fighting. Skyrim's combat feels like the equivalent of smashing action figures against each other, and not in the fun imaginative sense; I mean the combat truly feels like wildly smashing plastic figures against themselves. Granted, melee isn't nearly the only option at your disposal. Magic attacks didn't really do anything for me, but the healing was always nice to have on hand. A good way to tank damage if stabbing unaware bandits in the back with a dagger didn't work out.
Even if the combat is limp, my greatest takeaway from Skyrim is its sidequests. Despite the fact that I don't remember the names or faces of the people who sent me on my various quests, Skyrim did a damn good job at making the journey the memorable part, and not the destination. Almost every single cave and village I came across had something unique to experience. Sometimes I'd stumble into the lair of an alchemist breeding a nuclear spider army, other times I would find a guy pretending to be a ghost in a crypt. These little self-contained stories provide the best kind of tales to share with your friends, especially if it leads to some cool items. Needless to say, this made it all the more jarring that I thought the main quest was nothing special.
There you are, playing your high fantasy open-world game, when all of a sudden, you're the Dragonborn. You didn't ask for this. You didn't choose this, and yet, here we are. I thought the main questline of Skyrim to be boooooriiiiing. I think most of my disinterest stems from a lack of agency. Being the Dragonborn is cool enough, but it doesn't really play into anything. I just am the Dragonborn, whether I like it or not. None of your choices on the main path matter, all these important events kinda just happen around you. Fighting dragons and collecting shouts is cool, but it's not that necessary, and I rarely used them. Also, screw the Blades. I don't know why they're so pissy about the Shoutmasters on the mountain, and I am NOT killing one of the only interesting characters in the whole narrative. When people complain to the point of modding in the option to simply say "no", I think the writers officially lost the plot. I made a point to play through the main story quests before my save file got too big and whoops, I can't hide this problem any longer.
Yeah, I played Skyrim on the PS3, and as it turns out, PS3 Skyrim is arguably the worst version of the game. I got the game for Christmas, so I didn't really have a say in my platform of choice, but I'd probably have ended up getting it on PS3 just to know how people experienced Skyrim back in 2011, in its purest, unmodded form. From my point of view, Skyrim is Skyrim is Skyrim, minus the PC version, because people have modded that game to the moon and back, and I didn't want that clouding my opinion of the game. It's not "literally unplayable" on PS3, but your experience is on a time limit of sorts. Your save file size increases as you discover locations, take on more quests, and hoard more items. As your save grows bigger, load times take longer, and the game becomes buggier. Have you ever been swimming, and suddenly you stop swimming, and then you drop to the bottom and can't reach the surface? That's what actual nightmares are like, and this happened to me late in my playthrough! There were points where I passed up on exploring optional locations because I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to fulfill my self-assigned goal of finishing the main quest before the game slapped me with an infamous 10-minute loading screen or some game-breaking bugs. I never reached that point, but 11MB+ is nothing to scoff at.
Frankly, I would love to play Skyrim forever. I played it for a few weeks straight, only to feel a guilty sense of procrastination wash over me. I would play it more if I didn't set myself the "beat the main story quests" goal (and even then I got most of the trophies anyways, whoops), but I have other games I want to play. Todd will take hold of me again some other day...it's only a matter of time.
2 Comments
> Skyrim is a game that you cannot avoid.
Watch me.
Watch me.
Hooblashooga
2 months ago