I always have mixed feelings about Bethesda writing. On one hand, their Elder Scrolls universe is one of the most fleshed out, interesting and vibrant video game settings out there. There are whole wiki pages out there devoted to compiling, and cross referencing the huge amount of background lore from the five (or is it six?) Elder Scroll games. It is one of the very few fictional game worlds in which there exist named poets, scholars and artist about whom you learn through their works and artifacts. Bethesda is excellent at world building. You would be hard pressed to find another setting with so much accumulated lore and background fluff. The only thing that compares here are the Warhammer and Star Wars universes.

On the other hand, they have a bad track record for writing compelling narratives that involve the player. Excellent example of this is the Fallout 3 main quest, which is so full of plot holes that your suspension of disbelief falls right trough them. It is so bad, that if it was ever weaponized, it would very likely violate the Geneva convention.

I feel that I really can’t close the book on Skyring until I talk at least a little bit about it’s plot of all the major quest chains. Please note that unlike most of my other Skyrim posts up to date, this one is filled with spoilers. I will pretty much ruin every major plot point for you so beware.

Let’s start with the storyline I actually quite liked.

The Dark Brotherhood

The Dark Brotherhood is an example of what a faction specific quest chain should be. Unlike the Thieves Guild chain, this one is entirely about assassination. You start as a lowly new apprentice, then work your way up through the ranks, until you land the job of a lifetime. A contract so incredibly awesome, so daring and so high profile that you can’t believe it’s happening.

This is how it starts - kidnapped in the dead of night.

Its simple, elegant and straightforward. The main conflict is set up rather convincingly. When you join the Brotherhood it is led by Astrid – a head strong, pragmatic leader who is very protective of her “extended family” of dark brothers and sisters. She plays fast and loose with the brotherhood traditions and rituals putting safety, security and well being of her underlings above the ancient religion the Brotherhood is built around. She is a strong leader, fair and practical.

When you have couple of missions under your belt your sanctuary is visited by “The Keeper”. In the Brotherhood tradition, Keepers take care of the mortal remains of the Dark Mother – the most holy of artifacts of the society. Her mummified corpse is the conduit through which Sithis – your patron deity has communicated with the Brotherhood. Sadly, the Dark Mother has been silent for decades. Ever since her sanctuary in Tamriel was sacked and desecrated, Cicero has been on the run. When you read Cicero’s his journals you can find out that long years of solitude, spent hiding and defending the priceless artifact have driven him mad. Now he is stark raving insane. To makes matters worse, the first thing he does after arriving is not to thank Astrid for her hospitality, but to school her on the lax approach to the traditions and rules of the Brotherhood.

Cicero does not approve of Astrid’s leadership and you know he will be a problem right away. On the other hand you know that to some degree he is right – to return to it’s former glory, Dark Brotherhood should not lose sight of the traditions that made it great, or it’s connection to it’s patron deity. This becomes especially evident when the Dark Mother starts speaking again for the first time in years – and she speaks to you. Of course this complicates things as it immediately makes you Cicero’s #1 enemy, as it was the Dark Mother’s silence, and refusal to speak to him, that has driven him mad in the first place. It also changes your relationship with Astrid who feels that your “special” relationship with Dark Mother is a threat to her leadership.

Not unexpectedly, Cicero goes mad at some point and you end up having to take him down. Astrid follows suit, and decides to seal the deal and sell you out to the Empire. Unfortunately, in a M. Night Shyamalan plot twist she ends up dooming the brotherhood in the process. The sanctuary is destroyed, and most of your “family” dies in an imperial ambush.

Astrid’s betrayal is a bit sloppy. For one, it is never explained why would someone as careful, experienced and distrustful as her, give away the location of the sanctuary to imperial secret police. Up until that point she is characterized as a very direct, and forward person. For one, she has no problems telling you how she does not trust you, and tries to re-assert her dominance at every step. It seems little out of character for her to go behind your back and make a deal with the imperials. Especially since, if you were captured alive, you could easily reveal the location of the sanctuary and all of it’s secrets. It would be downright stupid of her to trust the imperials like that. But alas, that’s what happens.

This is how it ends, and its awesome

Fortunately, the lousy twist is redeemed by an awesome final mission. Or rather a re-do of the last one. But instead of pussy-footing with subterfuge and poisons you get to choose how to take down your target yourself. This mission is awesome not because of the writing, mind you, but because of the great setup, and complete freedom in how you execute it. You get to kill the Emperor of Tamriel on board of his flag ship.

I don’t know about you, but I opted for the “Ghost Ship” approach. I killed every living soul on board with the same dagger, leaving it an empty, lifeless husk. I figured that this would have made for an awesome legend: a single assassin eliminated entire crew of emperor’s galleon without being seen once, leaving the murder weapon soaked in blood of all the victims on the Emperror’s desk.

This just shows that Bethesda quest lines are best when they do what they are best at – set up an awesome scenarios, and then take a hands-off approach when it comes to execution. Whenever they try to script interesting set pieces, they usually start making mistakes, and create plot holes. When they stand back, and let you do the job, the result is much better.

The Thieves Guild

The Thieves Guild quest line the exact opposite. It is an example of how not to do quest chains for very specific factions. Rule #1 is that when questing for a specific faction, you should probably be doing missions that relate to the stuff that faction is all about. So thieves guild quests ought to be daring heists, burglaries, pick pocketing challenges and etc.. This is how this worked in Morrowind and Oblivion, but Bethesda decided to take a different approach in Skyrim. Namely, you never actually steal anything.

Nightingales armor - looks great, lousy for a thief

But that’s not the only jarring thing about this quest line. It is doubtlessly the worst one in the entire set. It is full of horribly evident plot holes, it makes the most notorious video game storytelling mistakes. Shamus Young has written a five part, detailed deconstruction of this quest line. He trashed it way better than I ever could, so instead of trying (and failing) to replicate his analysis here, I will just send you over straight to the source.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

I don’t think I could possibly add anything to this scathing, and yet hilarious analysis. The entire thing is silly, the rewards suck, you have to babysit horribly ineffective companions, and the scripting always wrestles control from you at every single key point.

The Companions

The Companions quest chain is probably the first one you encounter in your travels, and probably the most straightforward one. It is also a great deal of fun, because you get to do this:

When you first meet the Companions, they seem like an oddly democratic Warrior’s Guild. First few missions you undertake with them are straight soldiering. But when you finally get in good graces with them, it is revealed that the guild has a dark secret. All the members of the inner circle are Warewolfs. This condition is a result of an ancient curse cast on the founders of the society by a coven of witches. Over many decades, the members of the Companions embraced embraced this curse, and sought to use it to their advantage. To wit, to move up in the ranks and join the inner circle you must take on this curse yourself.

Being a Werewolf is not actually a bad thing. You get a once-a-day power that lets you turn into a powerful wolf form for a limited amount of time. You get bonus speed, strength and extra special abilities and virtually no drawbacks other than the social stigma attached to being a shape shifter. It is easy to see how a group of hunters and warriors would actually view it as a blessing, rather than a curse. But there is a catch.

The curse itself is related to the Daedric Lord Hircine. The souls of those who die as a Werewolfs will be claimed by him, and will join him in his realm of the great hunting grounds. For some, this is actually a preferable fate. Many of the Nords however, hope to go to Sovngarde – their ancestral afterlife realm after death. Some of the elders in the inner circle begin to regret the brash choice they made in their youth, because as they reach an advanced age they realize they will have to spend eternity away from their close ones who went to Sovngade.

I really liked this theological dispute raging on within the ranks of Companions. It added a little bit of depth to this rather simplistic quest line.

I don’t really have much else to say about it. I remember blowing through the entire thing in one sitting, without a single memorable thing happening. Most of the quests revolved either around trying to find a cure for the condition or side-tracked you with a vendetta war against the Silver Hand – an organization devoted to hunting down and exterminating Werewolves.

I will talk about The College of Winterhold, the Empire vs Stormcloaks war and the main quest sometime next week. Stay tuned. After that, there will probably be no more Skyrim posts… Probably.

But, Skyrim has one unique feature that is supposed to make up for it’s size. It is a feature it shares with no other Bethesda product: procedurally generated quests. Yes, you heard that right – Skyrim will randomly generate new quests for you, creating virtually endless amount of game play.

We briefly touched upon this subject when we discussed Project Frontier few months ago. Back then I wondered why no one was actually doing this sort of thing for creating random quests. After all, the very concept of procedural content generation is about as old as the history of RPG games on the computer. It dates back to the old-school ASCII games such as Rogue and NetHack which featured randomly generated dungeons and magic items. You thought I will mention Diablo, didn’t you? But no, Diablo and it’s many, many clones basically ripped off the Rogue formula, minus perma-death. But that’s a whole other story. Nowadays procedural terrain generation is back in vogue thanks in part to runaway success of titles such as Minecraft. But, no one has really done much in terms of procedural quest generation.

Procedural content generation is as old as NetHack

Why? One possible reason might be voice acting. Most of modern games are fully voiced, and as such, do not lend themselves well to procedural quest generation. The logistics simply don’t make sense.

And yet, here we are…. Skyrim has what they call a “Radiant Quest System” which works in parallel with regular scripted content. It collects information about your progress, and it adds quests appropriate for your level that concern places you have already visited. Bethesda claims that this system can add a potentially infinite amount of original game that will extend the amount of time people spend with their shortest, smallest and least complicated Elder Scrolls title. But is that true? I decided to find out.

When I first read about this technology I had mixed feelings about it. On one hand I was curious to see it in action. On the other hand, I didn’t really believe it could be any good. It sounded like an admission of guilt rather than a genuine innovation.

“Guys, we know our game is tiny but here is some half-assed, randomly generated filler content. Enjoy!”

Here is how I envisioned it: you walk up to an NPC, and you hear “Hey, could you do me a favor and pick up these things for me?”

At this point a note with a list of ingredients appears in your inventory. You know, stuff like ten rat tails, seven wolf pelts, twelve iron cups, eight Nirnroots, etc… The kind of stuff that falls out of animals or bandits when you hit them upside the head with a mace. So you go on your merry way, and collect every wooden cup, fork and linen cloth in sight to cross it off your list. After you have everything, you go hand it in, and get another list of different ingredients. More or less like a daily quest in World of Warcraft – dull, uninspired and boring.

It turns out I was wrong – at least in part. The Radiant Quest System is not nearly as bad as I expected it to be. In fact, I must say I was rather surprised how well it worked. For one, there are no notes. Nearly all radiant quests (at least those I could identify and radiant) were fully voiced. Furthermore, almost none of these were silly, MMO styled fetch quests.

A good example of how the radiant system works is the Dark Brotherhood end game. Once you finish their quest chain you can still go to their sanctuary and pick up contracts by approaching the Night Mother coffin. They are fully voiced assassination quests that are quite similar to the few of your initial contracts. The only thing that tips you off this is a procedurally generated content is that you are now killing no-name NPC’s. For example, my first quest was to a “nervous patron” in a specific drinking hall and discuss a contract. Upon showing up at the designated location, an NPC labeled “nervous patron” asked me kill a “shield maiden” walking the streets of Markarth. He did not have any other dialog lines, and would not elaborate on the nature of the mission. It was brief, and to the point “go to place X, kill person Y”. I did about a dozen of these just to see if the sound-bytes would start repeating but they did not. It seems that these quests work of a large sound bank of recorded lines and use clever sound editing to make each quest briefing seem unique, which is very nice

Do these quests still fill like a filler content? Yes they do. You can’t beat the manually scripted quests with pre-recorded conversation that tell you more about your goals and targets. This is especially evident when they tack them on as faction end-game play. For example, the Brotherhood quest line culminates in an absolutely epic assassination contract that just can’t be topped – the kind of stuff that makes contract killers retire on the spot. But in Skyrim you are asked to go back to petty murder immediately afterwards and it almost feels like a demotion, and a waste of your skill.

It is really hard to follow this contract.

On the other hand, there was obviously a lot of work done to make the radiant missions blend in with all the other content. You can’t blame Bethesda for not trying. The result is much, much better than the “kill ten rats” stuff I was expecting. So I guess my impression is generally positive, but reserved. I just don’t see myself getting a lot of millage out of radiant quests. They tend to be on the bland side – not nearly as colorful and interesting as the regular assignments. Not to mention that they never, ever end. This means that upon starting a radiant quest you will have a permanent entry in your journal, and a mark on the map that you can hide, but never remove. It is about as bad as that DLC quest guy in your camp in first Dragon Age Orgins. It wrecks havoc with your completionist OCD.

What is your take on the radiant quest system? Which of endless radiant quests have you unlocked so far? Would you have noticed it at all if I didn’t mention it? Let me know in the comments.

When you reach the Markarth you immediately know something is rotten in that city. People get shived in the middle of a busy street, and the city guards just stand around and let it happen. And it’s not just buggy Bethesda scripting either, because one of them walks up to you and tells you to mind your own business and forget you have seen anything or else. Soon enough you meet a concerned citizen who hires you to do some detective work for him and uncover the corruption in the upper echelons of the city’s aristocratic elite. It is basically a chain of rather interesting quests with some solid writing behind them – I will let you explore these on your own. The interesting thing happens when you go back to hand in the quest to the guy who hired you.

Note that this is a minor spoiler, so if you haven’t visited Markarth yet, and you don’t want to know anything about the quest line there you may want to stop reading. Otherwise continue.

Once you finish running all around the town, collecting evidence of corruption, your quest giver asks you to meet him in the local temple. When you get there you see a disconcerting scene. Your friend is sprawled on the floor below the altar, with three city guards standing above his body. As you enter, they notice you and quickly ensnare you with a scripted dialog sequence.

Now if you have ever played any video game RPG’s you immediately know where this is heading. You are about to experience a scripted prison sequence during which you will be stripped and disarmed and locked behind plot driven doors that won’t open until you finish a contrived chain of quests. Once you are done, your possessions will be waiting for you in a chest near the exit.

As you can imagine, I wasn’t particularly happy about this turn of events. I had other quests to hand in, places to be, things to steal, people to assassinate. In fact, getting captured this stupidly was completely out of character for me – a high ranging thieves guild member, a rising star of the dark brotherhood and a goddamned dragonborn hero of Skyrim. But because this was a scripted event I thought I was done for…

Until of course the game gave me an option – to go quietly, or to fight my way out of the temple. Guess which option did I choose? I instantly pulled out my bow, and started shooting. The guards wore heavy armor, and I did not have my usual sneak-attack advantage (most of my victims never even know what hit them) so to bring even one of them down, I essentially had to implement the “human porcupine” strategy in which an enemy usually ends up with more than 20 arrows sticking out of his face by the time he goes down. I was making a headway, humping over the altar, and abusing the shoddy AI path finding scripts to rain a sustained hail of arrows on my assailants when I noticed two more guards entering the temple.

I dropped another one, and two more came in. At that point I realized that I might be dealing with a “hydra railroading situation”. This usually happens in pen an paper RPG games when the GM really wants your party to get defeated and captured, so he keeps bringing more and more reinforcements every time you start winning. Eventually you run out of healing potions, and the hordes of enemies overwhelm you. The only way out of this situation is not to play.

So I decided on an experiment. I ran past newly arriving guards, grabbed the temple door and tried to open them. I was almost entirely certain that there would be a scripted plot-lock on them, but no. I was allowed to exit the building, and found myself in the middle of the city. A city filled with high level guards with heavy armor – all of whom somehow magically knew that I just triggered some scripted event. So mere seconds after I left the temple arrows started zipping next to my head, and I saw at least two guards fall off the high ledges, attempting to get to where I was. The entire city of angry guards was converging on me. To make matters worse, the bunch of dudes I have left in the temple started failing out of the building and glitch-bumping into each other in the limited amount of space available in the doorway.

So I jumped down from my high ledge into a temporary safety of the overhang, and decided that the only way out of this alive was to use speed. Luckily, somewhere along my travels I got turned into a Werewolf – and one of the nice benefits of the beast form is that it allows you to run faster than any horse in the game. I rarely use it, because shifting into a wolf in public instantly makes the entire city hostile to you and puts a bounty on your head. But seeing how I already was chased by the entire city, and already had a high bounty on my head due to my reluctance to be railroaded revealing my dark secret probably wouldn’t make my situation any worse.

So I quickly turned into a beast, and started running. Even though guards in Markarth are high level, and immune to my fear inducing roar I could still swipe them out of the way with my regular attacks for long enough to run past them. I did get hit by a few arrows but being a protagonist of an RPG game, this was just a minor inconvenience. I had enough hit points to spare.

I sprinted out of the city, passed the guard outposts outside it, hopped over a bridge and took the long cobbled road that would eventually lead me into the neighborhood of Whiterun where my house was. I did not fast travel, because I was still in beast form and the only way to shift back is to wait it out. So my plan was to keep running until I shifted, and then fast travel back home and figure out what to do next.

Then I heard a bloody roar from the clouds up above. A fucking dragon. When fighting dragons in your beast form, you are at a quite a disadvantage. You can’t gulp health potions, and you can’t shoot a bow and use the “become a spirit” shout to avoid their breath weapon. So all of my usual dragon hunting strategies were useless.

So I decided to ignore the flying monster. After all, every time I actually want to kill one of them to unlock a new shout, I have to chase them around, wildly spraying arrows into the air because they never seem to want to land anywhere. It’s like they have learned that I devour their souls to steal their powers, and learned to keep their distance and only do flyby breath attacks. Unfortunately this particular dragon either did not get the memo, or did not recognize me in my wolf form. So he swooped in, and landed directly in front of me. I ran directly into his open maw and got a face full of frost damage from his breath attack. So I did what any werewolf would do – I started swinging.

So we stood there exchanging blows. I would mash both mouse buttons averaging several claw hits per second. The dragon was less efficient. It would switch between bite attacks and breath attacks and sometimes just roaring at me. He dealt more damage per blow than me, but he wasn’t hitting me all the time. My DPS output was higher. And then I realized that I don’t just have to stand there taking his breath attacks. I can circle strafe and force him to move that bulky serpentine body around on it’s axis, forcing him to waste even more time on evocative, expressive movement animation.

Soon enough the monster was down. It was close though – my hit points were down to almost nothing and I couldn’t use any health potions while in beast form. Fortunately as I started to absorb his soul, my screen got fuzzy and my character started to shift back into her natural elf form. So there I was – standing in the middle of a meadow in my underpants, dragon soul energy still swirling around my body creating impressive lighting effects in the middle of the night. I have escaped Markarth, and ripped apart a dragon with my bare claws. It was a good night.

Then an arrow pierced my eye and I died. Who shot me? I couldn’t tell. Perhaps my circle strafing madness stirred up a bandit camp conveniently positioned near the road. Or maybe one of the guards outside of Markarth managed to catch up with me just as I was finishing my battle with a dragon. It’s hard to tell.

Unfortunately my last save was right in front of the damn temple where I got jumped by the guards giving me another shot at this quest. My epic escape got erased by my untimely death. On the upside, I now had the option to wrap up my other local quests, unload inessential gear in my house and come back to Markarth temple to see what that prison sequence was going to be about. And that’s exactly what I did, because I knew that there was no way I could top my crazy escape from the city, and the dragon fight that ensued afterwards.

What’s the craziest thing that happened to you in Skyrim?

Elder Scrolls games are where I release my inner munchkin and let him run wild. And one of the biggest issues I have with Skyrim right now is that Bethesda balanced out the enchanting system. Granted, perhaps I haven’t leveled up that skill quite far enough, but I just don’t see it as an endless well of abuse. In Morrowind I crafted a character who could leap over buildings, never took fall damage, had constant 100% chameleon effect making her nearly undetectable when crouched, and wielded one-hit-kill weapons. In Oblivion I made a blade that would temporarily decrease the targets available HP pool by 100 with each hit, and paralyzing them for a second at the same time making everything go down in at most 3 hits. These nasty combos seem to be absent from Skyrim. So far, I’m only able to use one enchantment per item making it severely limited, and causing my inner munchkin to stir uncomfortably.

That’s when I let him run wild as a werewolf:

Skyrim is a first Elder Scrolls game where I actually ended up taking on one of the two available curses (other being Vampirism), mostly because the game sort of steers you in that direction introducing the Companions faction early on. I must say I rather like the wolf form, and the fact I can use it to run faster than my horse, though it’s utility as a “travel form” is limited by your inability to use a map while you use it. It is great for mopping up low level mobs. The roar power I abused in the video above is extremely effective – as you can see, it allowed me to storm the Jarl’s castle virtually unopposed.

I also like the fact that after you become a Warewolf, NPC’s will sometimes remark that you smell like a wet dog. In fact, NPC’s will often comment on the stuff you are wearing. For example, if you don a Thieves Guild armor and proceed to prance around the city, the guards will recognize it and warn you that they are watching you. Little touches like this really make the game world come alive.

The aforementioned Thieves Guild armor is one of the faction specific armor sets. Most factions worth joining will actually bestow one upon you upon becoming a full-fledged member, and often give you an upgrade at the end of their quest chain. Here are the armor sets I have collected so far:

From left to right: Thieves Guild armor, Dark Brotherhood armor, Nightingale Armor

Ironically, I am still trying to complete a full Dwemer armor set, but despite rummaging through several ruins I have only found some boots and gauntlets, and about three cart-loads of swords and axes that are useless to me as I’m playing an archer. Not that I would need a heavy Dwemer armor either, but I want one nevertheless.

You see, I used to collect Dwemer artifacts in Morrowind. Exploring their murky, mysterious and haunted ruins was one of my favorite past times. In fact I almost pissed my pants out of joy when I found the museum in Tel Vos. Sadly, Dwemer ruins and the Museum in Skyrim are not nearly as exciting as I remembered them. I remember creeping through the rather spartan, claustrophobic industrial looking Dwemer halls filled with dilapidated steam machines and ghosts and being genuinely creeped out by their atmosphere. Skyrim ruins are very Ayleid like – very ornamental, very spacious and overrun by the Falmer who feel rather out of place. I’m not really a big fan of fighting feral, degenerate descendants of snow elves when exploring and contemplating the fall of the Dwarves. I think that making their abandoned underground cities very empty, and populated solely by strong and resistant automatons and freak-out ghost hauntings made these dungeons vastly more memorable in Morrowind. In Skyrim they are just like any other dungeon, just with industrial machinery sounds playing in the background.

What are your likes and dislikes so far? What are your favorite factions? Favorite dungeon types? Favorite items? Let me know in the comments.

I really like this game, but I’m not far enough into any of the quest lines to talk about the plot. I haven’t seen enough of the game world to talk about the setting and how it stacks up against Oblivion/Morrowind. So I figured I’ll do something different. I figured I will show you how I waste time in the game making my own adventures in a comic book form.

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One thing I hate about houses in Skyrim is that they start as absolute shit-holes and you have to spend money to upgrade them. In Oblivion I bought a shack in Bravil, and it came equipped with all kinds of essentials: tables, chairs, weapon racks, chests, etc. It was ready to go. In Morrowind I always just kill Dura gra Bol and take over her house, which comes fully furnished. In Skyrim I have spent 5,000 gold to buy a mansion in Whiterun and it came equipped with a wide assortment of spiderwebs, and raggedy-as bed. The only furnished part of the damn place is the cubbyhole where my Housecarl took residence. A cubbyhole directly adjacent to my bedroom. A cubbyhole without a door. Sometimes I wake up in the morning, and see that fully armored woman standing at the foot of my bed, just staring. What is up with that?

Also, I am addicted to the Whirlwind Sprint. I abuse it all the time when I’m in towns, up to the point where the guards pester me to stop. But I never will. It’s just too much fun.

When I was gathering screenshots for this comic, I figured I would just go outside Whiterun and look for picturesque locations. Then a wild deer crossed my path, so I decided this will be all about hunting.

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I have absolutely no clue why Bethesda never bothered to add horse combat. That feature was rumored to have been removed from Oblivion because they did not have enough time to test it. People bitched and moaned about it then, and the number of mods that added horseback combat was in triple digits. And yet, here we are – years later, and I still have to get off the horse to shoot a deer. Or to swat away an annoying wolf nipping at my feet. It’s positively silly.

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I really like the Giants. They just walk around, mind their own business and chill like complete bros. Gotta respect that. One time I was chased by four brown bears that I have somehow aggroed on my trip, so I rote past a giant. He fucked all of them up for me. I wanted to high-five him, but Giants just don’t give a shit. They are cool like that.

Dragons on the other hand are complete assholes. When you are low on hit points, or you are on a quest and just want to get from point A to point B they seem to be hiding behind every hill. You will be riding your horse minding your own business, and they drop from the sky like the mighty hammer of Thor, and ruin your day. But when you have shouts to unlock it’s like they know. Then they stay the fuck away from you. They will circle above your head, just trolling but they will never aggro. Always too far to shoot at, but too close to ignore. Fuck dragons.

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Initially I was intimidated by them, but I have quickly learned that they are not as scary as one would think. What really hurts you is their bite. Their breath attacks on the other hand can be withstood with some liberal use of health potions. If you have a good bow, and a good poison, and you keep them at breath attack distance you can pretty effectively needle them to oblivion with your arrows. The main problem is finding them, and getting them to fight you.

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Note that I haven’t turned in a single quest, I have not advanced the plot, I have accomplished nothing, and yet I still had a blast. This is one of the great strengths of Bethesda sandbox games – they allow you to wander around aimlessly and make your own adventures. In fact, they purposefully build their locations in a way that facilitates this game play. As you explore, you inadvertently stumble upon things to do.

What are your favorite Skyrim sandbox adventures so far? What is the craziest thing that has happened to you? Let me know in the comments. Please try to keep it spoiler free for those of us who might not be as far into the game as you are.

I guess the first and most important thing about Skyrim is that you don’t have to buy a brand new computer to play it. I bought my current gaming rig back in 2009. Under normal gaming hardware depreciation rules, my computer should now be somewhere in the “middle of the road” category. I could probably still play new releases, but only after cranking down the textures, resolution and shadow effects quite a bit. This is no longer the case. The game runs beautifully on my computer – I have almost all the settings maxed out, and it is fast, crisp and responsive. Should the credit for this go to Bethesda for designing a game that will work very, very well on few year old machines? Or perhaps this is a byproduct of the decline of the PC as a gaming platform. I highly suspect it is the latter. New PC’s outperform current gen consoles quite a bit already, but the mainstream gaming industry is increasingly console centric. Case in point – I have been waiting to ply Arkham City for weeks now – ever since it was released for the consoles. Unfortunately the PC release date kept getting pushed, and not that it fell beyond Skyrim release I no longer care. Batman can now go stand in the corner and wait till I get bored slaying dragons. Just a few years ago, such a discrepancy would be unthinkable. Unless the game was a console exclusive, the PC release date would be very important to the publisher. Now it is an afterthought for many of them. That said, I’m glad Bethesda still supports PC as a first class platform (well, more or less) and released all versions on one day.

Bethesda loves to have gameplay driven character creation sequences. In Oblivion the entire tutorial dungeon was nothing but an extended character creation sequence. Same goes for the “growing up in the vault” sequence in Fallout 3. These things have been getting progressively longer with each game. Skyrim is no different. The starting sequence involves being driven in a cart, waiting to be executed, running away from a dragon and a tutorial dungeon. One significant departure is that the game no longer asks you if you want to change anything upon exiting said dungeon. Probably because the character creation has been dumbed down quite a bit. But let’s not dwell on this just yet.

But yes, you do start as a prisoner. Every single Elder Scrolls game I have played started like this. It is a running theme I think. It’s not a bad thing – I just figured out it bears mentioning.

This is actually a really, really big improvement for me. When I play Elder Scrolls game, I tend to spend a lot of time on the facial feature design screen. I want my characters to look decent when I play them – especially when I’m making a female avatar. It usually takes a lot of tweaking to make a borderline passable face out of the potato-head looking presets supplied by Bethesda. In fact, I often resort to mods to fix this shortcoming, but alas – there aren’t any out there yet. Both Oblivion and Fallout 3 have been horrible about this screen. In both games you would design your face in dim, flickering artificial light which would cast unnatural shadows on your face. Almost always you would over-compensate for this when picking skin tones, and only after stepping into the daylight you would realize your character is essentially wearing clown makeup. Skyrim fixes this by letting you design your face in natural daylight, so you have a very good idea how it will look during most of the game play. Good job!

It seems that Bethesda put quite a bit of work into the face design this time around. In pretty much every single game they have released so far, the most popular mods are face-swapping ones which exchange the potato shaped lumps they use for heads with lovingly designed fan-made meshes and textures. Skyrim faces definitely look better than ones in Oblivion or even Fallout. That said, they still give you that fish-eye stare in conversations. Bethesda could learn a lot from watching how Edios approached scripted conversations in Deus Ex – where characters have expressive body language that more than makes up for limited amount facial expressions.

I have mixed feelings about the inventory screen. On one hand it is slightly better designed than the Oblivion one, in the sense that you can now see more than five items on the screen without scrolling. It also separates it from spell list, map and character stats. So instead of a single pip-boy like contraction, you know have several separate areas, all bout to convenient keyboard shortcuts which is great. That said, the entire thing is still very console centric. In fact the most convenient way to navigate is by using keyboard keys to move through the items, and the mouse just gets in the way half of the time. The stats screen is absolutely horrible – it is all style, and no substance. Only about five of your skill stats are visible on the screen at once, and navigating trough the perk trees is slow and cumbersome. It’s virtually impossible to get a good glimpse of your build with this interface, and I am impatiently waiting for a mode that will make it more readable. I just want all the info on a single screen. Is it that much to ask?

Oh, and the character silhouette is gone from the inventory screen. So if you want to play dress-up (like I do) you need to go in and out of the inventory screen. Either that or switch to third person view, swivel the camera. Since the inventory interface is a transparent overlay, you can actually see how the gear looks on you in the background.

Skyrim has scripted take down moves – kinda like the stealth kills in Deus Ex. Apparently they are trigger every time you kill your opponent with a critical. I highly suspect they will get really annoying as I was planning for a stealth build which usually involves some crit stacking. They can also get confusing in the heat of the battle. Few times when I was in a dungeon I triggered a take down without even knowing it, and was convinced that I just died – because the camera does exactly the same type of third person switch to show you your own demise. So yeah, this is not my favorite feature.

The Fallout style lockpicking is sort of the golden standard for door-based mini-games now. I’m glad they kept this mechanic instead of inventing something else. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.

Key bindings in this game are really strange. Alt is for sprinting and shift is for walking slowly. LMB is an active block, unless you dual wield weapons / spells in which case it becomes an extra attack key. Assigng weapons to number keys is needlessly complex. In previous Bethesda games to assign your favorite sword to 1, you would hold down 1 and click on the sword in the inventory. Now you have to do this:

1. Favorite the sword in the inventory with the F key
2. Exit inventory
3. Pull up the favorites menu with the Q key
4. Click on the sword in the favorites menu
5. Hit 1 to assign it to #1 key and approve your selection when a dialog pops up

Skyrim managed to take a two second task, and drag it into a minute long ordeal. Oh, and they also broke the Oblivion convention of using Z to move objects using the physics engine. Now you accomplish that by holding the E key.

I guess I need to show off my first character here. Feel free to post screenshots of yours in the comments:

Meet my Bosmer thief girl.

I’m actually pretty happy with the way her face came out. The presets for wood elves were beyond ugly. I’m not terribly impressed with her hair, but then again Bethesda was always really bad with their hair design. I’ll wait for some mods to rectify this.

This is essentially my biggest complain with Skyrim so far. Bethesda threw away the entire class / birth sign system. You can no longer pick the skills that you want to specialize in or the attributes you want to tag. The only choice that seems to have any gameplay impact is race. After you do that, you are essentially done. The only way you can tweak your character further is through leveling up.

This is a sort of brain dead approach to character design. Some people just want to jump into the game right away and I get that. But many of us really enjoy agonizing over these choices and making highly specialized builds. In the past Bethesda was able to appease both groups by providing pre-made classes (warrior, mage, thief, etc..) while at the same time letting you create custom ones, by tagging skills and picking perks manually. Now they dumped that all out and the game got instantly dumber because of it. Yes, it is more difficult to screw up your build now, but what if I wanted to play with an unbalanced character with specific strengths and crippling vulnerabilities. Bethesda took that choice away from me and I’m not happy.

Another per peeve – the map is horrible. I liked the map or Cyrodil and how it outlined the actual shape of the Imperial province. It really gave you an illusion that you are in the middle of a huge continent. It also very clearly shown the topology, landmarks and points of interest. Skyrim map is difficult to read. It is surrounded by snowy peaks and “fog of war” that obscure it’s borders to the point it is difficult to see the exact shape of the province. You also can’t zoom out all the way to have a birds eye view on the playable area. The fog and snow blend together and create an illusion that the map keeps on going. If you do pan around it though, you will quickly notice that it is in fact very small. Bethesda took great pains to obscure this fact, but the playable area in Skyrim is much, much smaller than that in Oblivion.

So far I have voiced a lot of complaints, but am I enjoying the game? @Ludonaut asked me the same thing and this was my response:

Yes, I am. Very much in fact. Skyrim is flawed, but I wouldn’t be live tweeting it, and writing 2k word summaries if I wasn’t into it. I am a big fan of the Elder Scroll series, and I’m looking forward to spending many, many hours exploring the Skyrim province and slaying dragons. If I complain about it, it is because I care.

What are your thoughts on the game so far? What type of character are you playing? What build are you going for. Post screenshots if you will – I recommend imgur.com for hosting. Use links, because I don’t believe that WordPress will let you embed images.