It just occurred to me that I have not posted a My Thoughts in awhile. Since this is pretty much all I’ve been doing lately, I decided to do one over Skyrim.
I have playing Skyrim for about a week or so now, when I got the PS3. So far I am only at 25 level, and I am Nord. I joined the Imperials, and I decided to kill all three hostages. I figured there is so much here, and even doing one thing different can change the way your game is played. I’ll play through like this, then when I finish or so as far as I felt could go (in, like, 20 years), I’ll start over and join the Stormcloaks and other things differently.
Before I bought the PS3, the closest I’ve ever came to a game as massive as this was GTA: San Andreas. I thought that as the ultimate in video game interactivity. I’m sure everyone reading this is more than used to games like Skyrim and Fallout 3 (which I also got, but I’m here to talk about Skyrim), but I am brand new to this. I love to explore, and I explore Skyrim with complete awe and wonder. I have a long list of unfinished questions, because I tend to get distracted by something else. I will be on my way to complete a quest and I’ll see something shiny in the distant and head toward that instead. On my way to complete a quest I get five more quests, of which only two will be completed right now.
Something that Cracked pointed out, which I experienced myself last week, was that the universe in Skyrim goes on whether you’re there or not. I never really knew what that meant until started playing it. I was walking and saw a mammoth. Those things can kill you in one move, so I saved before I moved forward (I needed to go past there and it was impossible to go around). As I was passing the mammoth, a dragon landed right in front of me and started attacking the mammoth, not me. In one small movement, the mammoth kill the dragon and I. I, of course, respawned right there. I didn’t move, as I knew the dragon was coming. When it landed, I watched the mammoth and dragon fight. As they fought, they disturbed a giant I didn’t notice before. The three creatures started fighting. The dragon eventually was killed (and I still absorbed it’s soul even though I had nothing to do with it’s death).
This is where I made my mistake. I saw that the mammoth and giant were now fighting each other, so I sneaked past them and grabbed the dragon scales. The mammoth and giant noticed me and I started running. In most games, AI are confined to a certain area, so I assumed once I went a few feet they couldn’t follow me anymore.
I ran from them between half an hour to an hour. They wouldn’t stop chasing me. I eventually got to a mountain and started climbing up. A couple minutes later they had me covered on a cliff. But I looked down and noticed little ledges, so I started jumping down little by little. A minute later, the giant fell past me. The mammoth had knocked it to its death. I had never experienced anything like that in a video game before. It was scary, but exciting at the same time.
This was a couple days after I started playing. Now I can take out a mammoth and giant together at the same time with my glass bow and glass arrows. If they run at me, I take them out with my duel-welded Daekbreaker in my right hand and Dwarf Axe in my left hand.
I have leveled up my sneak and archery really high. When I enter a cave of fort, I slowly take out everyone without anyone even knowing I was there. When I started, even headshots wouldn’t kill them, and now I can hit them pretty much anywhere while hidden and they die. Sometimes I use my sneak to be a Skyrim serial killer and murder innocent people without getting a bounty. I sent the following picture to my friends and asked them if I should be worried.
Creepiness aside, this is the best game I have ever played. It has a great variety of gameplay.You can go from clearing out a cave with stealth, so just running in swinging. I’ve done escort missions, I’ve done “fetch” missions, and I know I haven’t discovered all there is to do, because I’m learning more about this game the more I play it. I turn a corner and there’s an entire day of gameplay. I have friends who have played this since they bought it the night it came out and they are still playing and finding new things.
Long story short, there is no way to ever get bored playing this game.
The Blog 