Obligatory Skyrim entry

Because Skyrim.

People might say it's overrated, and I guess in some parts it is (ohai, bugged quests and arrows to the knee!), but I've been enjoying the game. I'll honestly say I hadn't played the previous Elder Scrolls games bar a 45-minute adventure in Oblivion about 2 years back. I know, I know, shame on me.

So why did I get into it while I have close to 0 knowledge with TES series? Maybe it's one of those more accessible games, yet yield some amount of challenge at the same time. Or maybe it's the extensive lore. Or the dragons.

Or maybe it's just Farkas.

It's not the bugs though.


What I've done so far:

Waste a lot of time with my game on pause. I've clocked 120+ hours according to my last save, but I don't know how much I actually played of that. I'll put it on pause and move onto a MMO or a handheld. I like the game, I really do, but it's another game amongst what I own and I'm slowly getting back into Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions on my PSP.

Anyways, I went with a male Nord who I named Gael. I've never really been into magic classes, and I can't stealth to save my life (Gael can back me up on this one). So I went all-out melee, heavy armor, and got myself a husband who can hold his ground in a fight: Farkas. Maybe Vilkas would have been a neat choice too, but there's something about Farkas... ahem. Moving on. I'm halfway through lv25, done a bunch of side quests and wasted a ton of time as previously stated. I don't have my stats handy though.


The awesome:

The lore. So much lore. So much backstory and books and dialogues and quests and - fuck, it's good. I've tried reading the books as much as I could, or just took them with me and stored them for later reading. I've been paying attention to the storyline and NPC backstories, as minor as they are. I love the accents.

My inner yaoi fangirl is very pleased with the fact I can marry anyone regardless of gender, hence my male Dovahkiin/Farkas marriage. I seriously giggled a couple times. I do, however, cringe everytime Farkas calls me "love" - it just sounds terribly OOC.

The map is extensive and very readable, provided you have a good TV (one of my RL friends suffered this issue, unfortunately, hope she got her TV today).

An odd thing I like it the dead body physics and how they realistically fall, roll on slopes and fall off cliffs. I laugh everytime I send someone flying with Fus Roh Dah... and I laugh even more when they land.

Radiant quests are awesome, really.

The bunny kill counter.


The good:

Interface is nice. It's very, very Oblivion/Fallout-like - as I said before, I hadn't played Oblivion much, but I had a good taste of Fallout New Vegas. And my very first impression was "LOL IT'S FALLOUT BUT SET UP NORTH". The graphics aren't bad at all, especially at night and in anything related to Dwemer / Dwarves.

I love the changing weather, but I like it less when I can't see in darker areas. My TV has dynamic lighting/gamma and it can get frustrating at times.

The music score is well done too. The tone was familiar and I stopped a couple times, trying to remember where I had heard similar keys, chords, crescendos and general flow. I wasn't surprised when I found out it was Jeremy Soule, who did the Guild Wars music as well.


The bad:

Animations. Seriously. Some NPCs don't walk, they just glide around. The NPCs talk to you whenever your PC is somewhat facing them, or just hangin' round. Which drives me absolutely nuts when you consider I'm an auditive person. Hearing them repeat the same dialogue ad nauseam eternam makes me wanna go Fus Roh Dah on their asses...

The follower AI is ridiculous at times. I understand they won't jump cliffs like I do (Farkas is much less suicidal than Gael). I wouldn't have any problem with that if the game didn't take it to the extremes. I jump off a tiny cliff and the follower AI reverts to a dumbass, and absolutely has to find the "shortest" path back to me without using that damn cliff which would have saved the both of us 5 minutes, if not more at times.

Talking about followers... Farkas gets incredibly OOC at times it seems. When I first married him, he started calling me "dear" and "love", which I thought was a little weird coming from freaking FARKAS. I did his purify quest and that behavior stopped. It brought and end to him being my little personal shop (he won't sell me potions and lockpicks anymore, the motherfucker...). On top of that, he passed from "essential" to "non-essential"... which means he can die now.


The ugly:

The insane amount of bugs.

Gimme a break here. I know all games end up with some exploit that was found too late in testing, some that were simply waived as being "by design" or deemed too minor to fix, and some that were simply not found until your average gamer did something they shouldn't have (or should have done, really). I find localization bugs in English, and I'm not even a native speaker. (Then again, that's what I've been trained to do, as a loc tester)

But the amount of bugs in Skyrim is purely ridiculous for a release game. Seems every quest has one or several bugs to it, ranging from "this NPC may not appear, simply exit the area and come back" to "you're screwed, restart your save file, GL". What I can remember, or didn't block from my memory yet:

- Farkas refused to follow me after his purify quest. Then he disappeared, and I had to reload my save file to find him. He followed me right away.
- Talking about Farkas, he got killed yesterday during the Battle of Whiterun; the Stormcloaks tend to attack followers.
- One of my quests bugged because I was a step ahead. I was doing this quest in Morthal, Laid To Rest, and I killed the lady before checking the coffin. Big mistake. Had no save handy, lost a good hour of gameplay.
- Farkas again: This is a funny one. I was in Darkwater Pass; he fell off a waterfall, onto some rocks, and got stuck there. He stopped following me and I had to reload a file to find him. I had to patiently wait for him to find a way to get outta the rocks and into the water. He kills spiders even though he's arachnophobe, but a bit of water and I need to hold his hand.
- I've tested beta games that were more stable than Skyrim. I only had one major crash/showstopper - my console froze completely when I first entered Fort Amol - but the amount of framerate drops is pretty bad.

That's just what I remember. It's nothing close to looking at any quest over at UESP...


So to resume it all:

It's a pretty damn good game, just be careful when doing quests and pay attention to your follower. If you can get the PC version, go for it - they left the cheat console on it and it comes in really handy.

Now go kill some dragon ass!