Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Yep, I have an academic understanding of the mechanics of trapping souls, but I haven't put it into practice yet, mostly because I feel a little too squishy to spend magicka on anything but flaming enemies.

I just played an amazing dungeon that was part of the Hangover quest. So the dungeon is filled with mages, most of whom I can easily dispatch, but at the end I have to fight a fairly high level wizard who throws lightning at me, which I didn't realize also saps my magic on top of pretty sizable damage, meaning I died to this bastard a bunch of times. Out of a sense of let's try something else, I see a hallway I haven't explored yet and sneak into it, and I see that it has a trap where a spiked gate that slams into anyone who steps on a pressure plate. I think that maybe I can lure the wizard into this trap, if he avoids it at least I'm in a place that has a choked point. So I sneak attack him to knock off about a third of his hp, and he starts looking for me as I hightail back to the corridor. He steps on the trap and BOOM the spiked gate finishes him off. The level design and the challenge and the novel solution plus the quest line all made tqhis quest... A NIGHT TO REMEMBER.

yeah, for all the dungeonses linearity you have some real fun leeway in how you go about dealing with the baddies

I'm missing Lydia (RIP) now, because the one housecarl I have access to is Valdimar, and nearly every time I try to give him stuff to carry, he asks me, "Do you want something my thane, or do you want to give me something?" in his deliberate Nordic drawl, which is driving me crazy.

maybe a similar mission, or the same, but I had something similar which took many many attempts and could only be achieved by using a rush shout to cover the distance to the magician, then knocking him unconcious, trying to deal as much damage as possible whilst eating all the apples/bread to keep my health up and once he revived, trying to knock him unconcious again.. any gap or slight deviation would just destroy me and i'd have to start again...

I swear, I took days replaying that same 40 sec part till I had it right, man I miss my Skyrim save on my PS3...

Was there a portal you could go into after you beat the boss? I just finished another quest that culminated in going to another plane of existence to fight a warlock and some high level minions that I had to cheese, but the loot was worth it.

I've been putting off choosing a side, I mean, I instinctively am against imperial hegemons, but I'm a dark elf and the Stormcloaks are racists. Then again, the Stormcloaks weren't the ones who swooped in on a fort I cleared of bandits before I had a chance to collect all the loot because I was already overburdened.

stormcloaks might as well be wearing red Make Skyrim Great Again hats, i couldn't deal with their racist bullshit when i played through in 2011 or whatever but revisiting in this era it's like gah

xps: Yep, illusion tree (which complements with conjuration tree) is easy mode. Spy foes at a distance, cast fury/frenzy/mayhem, twiddle your thumbs, repeat as necessary, send in a atronach to mop up the lone wounded survivor. It's kinda fun with despicable factions (which also include Stormcloaks for me). Playing assassin, just be invisible, all the time. Works perfectly in the basic game, but it has its downsides in character progression facing late game bosses (unless you work up magicka potion making).

The last time I played through (fighting a depressive episode in late 2016) I recall I was barely ever wounded. Just infinite money from potion making, no one could ever see me, most adversaries died to fraternal violence, and my dagger had a 15x damage bonus.

If the basic gameplay loop wasn't so airtight, I might play this again, but forbid myself the "easy mode" perks (which also include archery and all the crafting skills). The lingering appeal seems really in the lore, in 2016 I actually read all the books in a Kindle compilation; its a pretty rich universe, and 15% of the books are actually good writing.

Wow. Always wondered who would ever read all those random books

Most of the texts are only couple pages on the Kindle; 30 seconds to skim. It's a better experience than finding books 2 and 4 of a 4 or 9 volume set in game. I recall the collection was 3 nights for me.

Mind I'd never played the prior games (something like 60% of the books are grandfathered in from them), and am not much of a fantasy-lit fan, yes I made it through LotR as an 11 year old, but balked at Silmarillion. But the nature of the assemblage, built up in geological layers over 5 games, means its a pretty rich universe, with some weird things offscreen. Sometimes one just wants to inhabit a distant universe.

There are whole YouTube channels devoted to exploring obscure corners of the lore, if one just wants to put it on in the background.

i read something recently that said they only really started putting the lore in in Morrowind, but i've never really played Arena or Daggerfall, too clunky. conflicting narratives is a big part of why i love the Elder Scrolls tbh

stormcloaks might as well be wearing red Make Skyrim Great Again hats, i couldn't deal with their racist bullshit when i played through in 2011 or whatever but revisiting in this era it's like gah

So it's choosing between Trump and W? Wonderful.

I pay zero attention to pretty much any video game narrative because narrative is, for whatever reason, the thing that pretty much every video game does the worst. So I've done a pretty good job of ignoring whatever story was taking place throughout the hundreds of hours I've spent on this game.

Narrative has never been Bethesda's strong suit, although Morrowind comes close.

Designers are at pains to reconcile the linear demands of narrative as it unfolds over time (no matter how non-linear the yarn itself purports to be) with the countless options that we have come to expect from video games, which value agency above all. Games such as Skyrim, which stake everything on the freedom to wander, tend to fail as vehicles for storytelling in the traditional sense. Conversely, Planescape: Torment or – if reviewers are to be believed, as I haven't played it yet – Disco Elysium excel in terms of sheer writing, to the extent that gameplay and narrative become indistinguishable. The Witcher 3 comes closest to synthesizing open world design with a story arc worth a damn but it's still too simplistic in the latter department to fully impress (the side quests and DLCs, on the other hand, are stupendously good for the genre).

Note to self: the next time I kill two dragons on my way to a dungeon, gov back to my house to drop off the damn bones and scales. Seriously, I think a quarter of my time playing thus far has been debited solely to inventory management.

#PS4sharehttps://t.co/GBhItadLN3 pic.twitter.com/kVJy6c418R

— Leee (@plechazunga) April 24, 2020

Let’s see if that works, sorry for the PS store link.

One positive of having a companion is that you can make them lug your shit around. Until they die in a battle and you have to make multiple trips back and forth between their corpse and your home in order to get all your shit back.

Yes, inventory management can be a big time suck in this game.

Ah that video came out darker than I expected, it shows me trying to firebolt a frostbite spider in a mine but missing, then resorting to shouting at it which launched it straight up.

Yeah I've been rolling with a companion mage as a pack mule that happens to conjure ice atronachs. I've actually reloaded a previous save if I accidentally kill them to avoid just that scenario, though I didn't do it when I killed Lydia because a) the fight was tough and I didn't want to go through with it again and b) it was in Whiterun so I didn't have to go far to recover the loot.

Always go with the companions that cannot be killed!

Somehow lost Lydia swimming in high seas near Winterhold and now I’ve lost all the loot she was carrying for me

Lydia, oh Lydia, say have you seen Lydia, oh Lydia my pack mule lady

I just picked up a perk where my attacks no longer hurt my companions, so time to let 'er rip!

I tried playing this for the first time a couple weeks ago but didn't get very far. It's very pretty but it also makes me very anxious playing it! Maybe I'm not cut out for CRPGs.

lol i get that a lot, i don't think playing stealthy helps

Every time I come back to this after an extended absence, I'm all like, 'this is one of the best games ever, why would I ever take an extended absence from playing it,' and I'll have a good ol' time for a couple of hours and then the game will inevitably freeze up for no goddamn reason and I'll lose all of the progress I've made in the couple of hours I've been playing and then I'm all like, 'ohhhhh, yeah, this is why I take extended absences from playing it.'

(FTR, I'm pretty sure I turned off autosave because I read somewhere that the autosave function increases the likelihood of random freezeouts, but the failing to manually save is I guess all hubris on my part. But seriously, the brokenness of this game is only just slightly outweighed by its awesomeness.)