The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Part 5)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5

Today: everything else.

EXPLORING SKYRIM: THE DRAGON PRIESTS

I touched on that topic during my re-telling of the main quest, but here goes. Your trips through draugr ruins may end in a battle against a Dragon Priest. These priests can be a lot of trouble if you come unprepared, as they’re usually at the end of long dungeons and often have their own strategy against you.

Eight draugr ruins end with a fight against a named Dragon Priest, and each one of them carries a mask with its name. Beating all eight and picking up the masks off their cold, dead bodies will unlock a ninth. Each mask has an armor rating that can be upgraded at smithing tables, and a unique effect – so unique, you can’t destroy them at enchanting tables in order to put that effect onto other items.

Two notable examples of named Dragon Priests I’ve encountered are Rahgot, whose strategy involves swarming the room with draugr to take down the Dragonborn and their follower, and Krosis, the only one of those who doesn’t live in ruins but rather at a dragon peak, and will attack along with that peak’s dragonic resident if you choose to come too close. Then there’s Nahkriin, which must be defeated in the main quest.

I think these enemies are pretty cool! These fights can be awesome.

EXPLORING SKYRIM: DAEDRIC WISHES

Just take a look at Sanguine and tell me this isn't a
goddamn demon. I dare you.

While venturing Skyrim (or Tamriel, really), you may stumble upon a quest involving the Daedra. They’re semi-godly to godly beings, some of whom can be more closely described as demons. They’re not all bad, but many of them are. They love to mess around with the living, and the arrival of a new hero in the Dragonborn has got many of them very interested. The more powerful ones are called Daedric Princes.

A Daedric Prince’s quest may spring upon you when you least expect it. You randomly find the pieces of a short blade. You discover a sphere known as a Beacon and are asked to bring it to Meridia’s temple. While seeking a runaway dog, you find one… that talks in English, with a Brooklyn accent, in a medieval fantasy setting. You get into a drinking contest with a guy that turns out to be the Daedric Prince of debauchery in disguise, and the Dragonborn’s ensuing bender makes him run into drunken adventures across the land. You’re tasked with ending the recurring nightmares of residents of Dawnstar, which involves the Daedric Prince Vaermina in a nearby dungeon. And so on.

Meridia, one of the least bad of the lot.
Her weapon is super-destructive against the undead!

I haven’t met all of them yet, but those are examples I’ve seen. By completing these missions, you frequently get a unique equipment item out of it. Says a lot that after 150+ hours in this game, I’m still discovering stuff.

EXPLORING SKYRIM: SO MANY FACTIONS

You can’t join every faction across the land, but you can join most of them. There’s the conflict in the main quest, which sees the Greybeards and Blades at opposing ends of the dragon crisis. There’s the civil war opposing the Imperials and the Stormcloaks. However, there are several other groups to join.

There's usually more people than that.
Also, I'm standing in the fire.

First are Whiterun’s Companions, a group of brave warriors doing random lawful good acts of kindness. Oh, and some of them turn into werewolves. And you can, too! You can also become a vampire in this game.

You come close to joining the Thieves’ Guild in Riften during the main quest. Should you choose to join it, a long questline awaits. Enjoy your life of crime! (If you weren’t already living one!)

Upon your arrival in Windhelm, you can complete an orphan’s request to kill a nasty orphanage headmistress. However, the next time you go to sleep and wake up, you find yourself in a nondescript shack, forced by Astrid, leader of the Dark Brotherhood, to kill one of three morally-dubious people. The headmistress was the Brotherhood’s contract. You can follow Astrid’s orders, kill one of these people, and join the Dark Brotherhood… or, since her actual order is to kill someone in the room, you can kill her and go on a quest to destroy the Dark Brotherhood for good.

Nothing like an isolated college of magic practitioners
to feel like a youth literature protagonist.

Then there’s the College of Winterhold, which you do join during the main quest – but then it’s up to you whether you choose to follow the wizard lifestyle or not. Up in Solitude, the Bards' College might also be of interest.

In Markarth, there’s also the Forsworn, though it’s… complicated. Let’s just say you unravel a large conspiracy in there that eventually gets you sent to prison, and you can plan an escape by sort-of-joining, but you’re never really a part of that group. Which is for the better, really. The Forsworn are murderous asshats. Don't worry, you can kill them later.

You can be a member of almost every single one of these groups at the same time, contradictory beliefs be damned.

EXPLORING SKYRIM: RADIANCE

Let’s pretend that you’ve finished every big quest you could do. Well, The Elder Scrolls V is designed so that you could technically always have something to do. Aside from main quests, you can collect several smaller quests, most of which are known as “Radiant quests” (kept in the “Miscellaneous” section of your Quest journal). Those can be given to you by minor NPCs, or may be orders from Jarls and other major characters. A Jarl needs a giant killed? Bandits have taken over some mine? Perhaps the librarian of the College of Winterhold needs you to find some books for him? Does someone need a certain quantity of a particular item?

There isn’t much to say about those, really – unlike main quests, they don’t have any incidence on the plot, nor do they involve any major interactions. A few radiant quests may lead to the discovery of larger quests, however…

DUNGEONS, LICHS AND… ER… CASTLES?

Also known as "More bad guys to kill or serve".

There goes my attempt at tying the letters of DLC into anything Elder Scrolls-related. Anyhow…

I purchased the early version of Skyrim, the one that went down to 20$ when the HD re-release came out. For some reason, DLCs aren’t available for the original version anymore. The Special Edition includes all of the add-ons, as well as the related new quests, items and possibilities. This includes:

-Dawnguard: A vampire lord is trying to take down the sun itself. You can choose to join him, or fight him.

-Hearthfire: A DLC more practical than action-based, this one allows a player to buy a plot of land and build their own home just as they want it, and even hire staff! The base game actually allows for a player to marry one of several characters they may have met on their journey – with Hearthfire, it also becomes possible to adopt two orphaned children. …What, you expected a Dragonborn to do the do in a T-rated game?

I want this guy's helmet.

-Dragonborn: This one opens a brand new, sprawling questline, in which the first Dragonborn, named Miraak, wishes to reclaim his title now that dragons have made a return in the world. A new island to explore, more dungeons, more Dragon Priests, in short – a complete secondary story.

I’m actually going over these pretty quickly as I need to wrap up, also they aren’t in the game I purchased. I’d need the Special Edition for that, and after 150 hours… I don’t feel like going through the game again.

FINAL WORDS

Took me long enough, but here I am.

All the sights you'll see!

With no surprise, I’ll say that Skyrim is, for the most part, a good game. It’s by far the most expansive action RPG I’ve ever played, with more freedom in how to play one’s own character than I’ve seen in any other game before (but that may be that whenever I go for an action RPG, my choices are usually pretty basic). The huge map is a treat to discover and there are enough different environments to keep the player interested even if the color palette is a bit more in the grays, browns and whites across the world. Hundreds of NPCs have complete backstories and schedules, and tend to their things, which makes the world feel alive. You can go for scripted events, or have completely random encounters with travelers as you go! Sure, in one playthrough you’re gonna hear a thousand times the guards’ tales of taking an arrow to the knee, but hey – can’t all be perfect.

Hell, the mere fact that you have complete freedom of choice in this game is a breath of fresh air to me, the Nintendo guy, who's lived for years with games where the options were “Yes” and “You're wrong, pick Yes”.

Killing all dragons? Sure. Well, except maybe one.

The humongous number of missions is certainly welcome, along with any branching paths that may invite the player to do things differently on another playthrough, like joining the Stormcloaks instead of the Imperials, or choosing to kill Paarthurnax if you spared him before.

I will admit that I was fairly reticent to playing this game, or any Bethesda game really, in part because their unfortunate reputation for releasing games that are glitchy messes had preceded them, but also because Fallout 76 came out and destroyed whatever good faith they seemed to have left. And I had sworn to myself I wouldn’t talk about F76 here, dammit! Anyhow, while I did run into my fair share of glitches and bugs, it was never so horrendously bad that I couldn’t enjoy the game.

Of course, from time to time I would run into a weird situation (such as an NPC or item simply not appearing), wonder what to do, look up that NPC on a wiki devoted to The Elder Scrolls (UESP in particular), and either a) find out what to do in the game, or b) literally spawn them into existence near Nikhaolaas using the debug mode, accessible with the # key. It goes without saying that a normally-developed game wouldn’t require this type of effort on the player’s part. Although I do understand; a massive game such as this one, with several possible scenarios, means many ways the programming can screw up, and there ought to be some glitches Bethesda’s game testers and QAs would have missed.

I didn't run into that one, but damn,
I kinda wished I did, now.

...Maybe not so many that damn near every page of an Elder Scrolls wiki needs a “glitches” section regarding every way the game can break? Reading some of those, I feel lucky that the worst that happened to me was clipping through the ground and respawning on it seconds later. On one hand, it is true that glitches didn’t ruin my experience too much, even if I kept to playing the vanilla game. On the other hand, that’s still a buttload of glitches in there! Game crashing for no apparent reason? Yep! Stopping as I quit an alchemy table? Yep! Weird stuff happening to NPCs? Seen it. Mammoths falling from the sky? Yep. Let's just say that I completely understand why people mod the game by patching out its worst glitches.

Other critiques aside from the glitches. There’s an element of random to the game, in that a lot of loot is spawned as you find it. Generally, that’s not so bad since items found that way tend to get better as you go up in level. However, if you’re looking for something precise (such as a spellbook to learn a precious spell), good luck. Unless you build it yourself with the game’s complex and detailed crafting system, you might never find it. The random spawns also means you might become a bit of a hoarder over time, which is why owning a house to store everything becomes a necessity fairly quickly. The game is also built so that many enemies will level up with you up to a certain point, meaning there’s always a bit of a challenge even after a hundred hours.

Now, if only I could keep the crown.

The game feels fairly complete, glitches notwithstanding, and a lot of questlines seem decent. Still, the game being rushed in development for release on 11/11/2011 is perceptible from time to time. The main plot is pretty basic as far as fantasy stories go. Some elements, such as the Civil War, seemed to be a major point of focus for the game (explaining why some of them awkwardly barge into the main questline from time to time). Looking into unused game data reveals many quests that couldn’t be implemented in time that would have helped make this game feel even more lively and interesting. I’m not disappointed by what I’ve played, but it does feel at times like more could have been done.

I also felt that some skills were pretty tough to excel in. As you go up in player levels, you need to level up your skills more and more often, and some vital upgrades to particular skills happen at pretty high levels for those skills. As an example, you can’t upgrade enchanted equipment until Smithing Level 60, and creating dragon armor out of the heavy bones and scales you pick off killed dragons isn’t until Level 100. You’ll usually end up splitting the skill points gained off leveling up pretty unevenly based on the skills you feel you need, forgetting about the others. Then, most magic schoolsare pretty tough to level up if you're not playing a magic-practitioner character. And may the Gods of Tamriel help you if you choose to go Legendary on any skill…

Once again: Apologies to arachnophobes.
There are so many giant spiders in this damn game.

Last but not least, while I can praise the world map for being large, interesting ad at times simply gorgeous, I will admit that a lot of dungeons feel samey. There aren’t that many variants when it comes to dungeons, so if you’re exploring several of them like I did when I started, you quickly realize that there isn’t a ton of variety to them. Once you’ve seen two or three draugr ruins, you realize they’re all roughly the same. Most caves also feel similar. It’s a limited number of dungeon types to explore, on a map where there’s several dozens of those dungeons. It makes adventuring feel more than a bit repetitive after a while. Sure, there are rewards to be gained from this and many dungeons have their own associated mission, but when you’re exploring on your own, it may get a bit boring and tedious. Not helping this quest is that not every dungeon can be cleared, making it a hassle to remember what you visited and “cleared” when the map doesn’t always reflect it.

But yeah, all those issues put aside, I liked The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I might play it some more once in a while. For all the fears I had due to it being a Bethesda game, I was pleasantly surprised! I would say I’m looking forward to playing the other Bethesda games I have, but since they’re all huge games, I doubt it’ll be anytime soon.

(Also hey, mods are always there to improve the base package...)

Next Friday: Something much shorter.