the elder scrolls v skyrim - 6/10
fuck around and never find owt
i'm nowhere near done, i'm pissing about tons and i'm just kind of knocking about the landscape. this is a first for me; i was a morrowind baby, both console and on my shitty little toshiba satellite laptop, before graduating to oblivion after my mother's drinking buddy lent it to me for a week or two when i was like, 12. since then, i have had somewhat of a passing interest in the elder scrolls. at least, enough to get rather passionately heated about how i believed skyrim to be, in some degree, antithetical to the complete player agency that i associate with the elder scrolls, with weaker systems due to required dilution for easy understanding from new console players, lurches in the lore, and weaker writing than their predecessors - i was effectively experiencing the same thing with fallout at the time, with my interest in bethesda's titles diminishing more with each release, whilst those original two games plus new vegas thoroughly made their place in my heart, mind and soul, which continues to this day. much the same, i continued on with morrowind and oblivion, a scowl shot at the mention that somebody had only played skyrim, with a joaquin phoenix joker-ass mutter to myself that "they wouldn't get it".
thing is - a lot has changed in my life since then. a lot of things that have led me on a path to calming the fuck down, thankfully haha
and so, i thought to give skyrim another chance on a whim this october, and ive been slowly chipping away at bits and bobs here or there ever since, as a little bedtime cozy treat. and in this situation - pure relaxing gaming, just knocking back the hours with a nice cup of tea, some biscuits and a controller in bed - it excels. i truly do love what skyrim has been doing for me since i started giving it a chance.
now, on a deeper level, however? that kid me is still barking at the back of my mind a little bit, as i do revel when i'm half-asleep in the lack of a need to be paying particularly too much attention to all that im up to with crafts and potions and general traversal and stuff, but otherwise... yeahhh i can't lie to you, the worlds of morrowind, oblivion, and hell, even my more recent and very scant dabbling with daggerfall via daggerfall unity have shown me more in-depth locales to visit and get lost in. there's infinitely more depth to the quests of oblivion, the systems of morrowind, the sheer volume of daggerfall, to the point where in each of these categories, these games tower against skyrim. but as a combination of all these elements, it's pretty decent! sure, there's something to be said about being a jack of all trades and a master of none. especially because that, if anything, only makes me feel more hard done by that some things are lacking - like, imagine if there wasn't the endless fodder quests in skyrim, and they had used the quest programming time to polish up the map some more, or what if the map wasn't as expansive to allow for more things to be done in it? there is also a great part of me that misses the rigidity of a build in morrowind or oblivion, where you were largely committed to one weapon type from the beginning, as opposed to just being able to pick up anything and immediately swing it around like a god. it lends itself more to the role-playing experience and makes me feel more immersed in my role as my character, rather than feeling like ive altered the face, race and place of an ubermensch dragonborn who is already predestined to be Like The Greatest. i dont know, i guess i just like to feel like im a downtrodden prisoner who just so happens to be on course with fate, as opposed to being secretly born into fate. subtle nuance, yet youd be surprised how often i bang that drum.
and yet, i cant stop playing it at night. what were once half hour sessions have spiralled out of control into 5 hour benders that only get stopped due to my bodily pains putting me to sleep. it's got an addictive quality to it, i just want to steal more shit and kill more shit. i guess there's a part of my brain that is getting scratched in lieu of me playing on private world of warcraft servers, where that sort of mmo progression of "grind your levels to kill the bastards to grind your levels" lies and acts as an unfortunate control over my little dog brain that gets so very entranced by number going up. its why it takes me an abacus and an afternoon to calculate how many times ive done the heists of gta online; even if i dont like the game, i get lost sometimes in making number go up if the cheese is sufficiently okay enough.
that said, skyrim is, all in all, a pretty alright time. i still vastly prefer its predecessors on a critical level in just about every capacity, but with mods, i can make skyrim a very comfortable experience to play with a controller in bed to kill time, energy and braincells if my body is playing up. that is a very valuable thing to me, and basically the whole reason i am enjoying it as greatly as i am. it is a low-stress, low-stakes, low-effort environment which i can continue to explore and get An Video Game out of, whilst not being strenuous or challenging. its a toothless beast, but sometimes you don't want biting.