A thread for updates on my adventures there.
So I've played a reasonable amount of the game now - I thought I'd give it a fair shot after the number of recommendations I've been given - and
Things I've done:
- Main quest as far as meeting the greybeards.
- I'm a thane in Whiterun and Hjaalmarch (I think that's the marsh area)
- I have a small house in northern Hjaalmarch which I'm thinking of expanding. I'm kinda nervous in case I get dragon attacks there.
- I became a bard, and have been set a bunch of quests relating to finding lost mythic instruments
- I also went to wizard college and now have to go find the staff of Magnus
- Like a bajillion other minor quests, this game does not mess about when it comes to sheer quantity of content.
I'm running a magician-based character (summoning, destruction, restoration) and trying to do some specialising in alchemy and speech/persuasion too: I'm using Lydia as my companion since she fights better than I do (literally I sometimes run fights where I just cast healing on her and let her hit the enemies with axes and stuff).
Geenral feeling so far is that the good about this game is mainly in sheer quantity of plot, which is very large indeed, and in the cinematics: dragon fights are really well handled and feel very good indeed, and that sort of fight I think I'd say is the core game selling point: feeling the three dimensionality of fighting a dragon isn't something often done well in games. I quite liked meeting Sheogorath, that was fun, and the range of enemies is quite reasonable though I'm starting to get deja vu on dungeon crawls and draugr. There's definitely a degree of investment in the setting that feels expected but is somewhat rewarded with time sunk into the thing, and it definitely effectively gives the impression that there is way more to this world than can reasonably be dealt with, which frustrates the completionist part of my brain but which I like from a world building angle.
My feelings on the downsides are mostly mechanical and in the depth of content. The inventory system is clunky, feels a bit too designed for consoles, and sometimes closes when I'm trying to click a menu option - and also has perverse incentives especially re weight limits where the ideal thing is for me to run multiple times around empty dungeons to pick up stacks of swords to sell, which I don't actually
do much because who has time but then I end up constantly short of coin. Whilst the super clean UI is good for cinematics, I really want much easier weapon and spell switching available most of the time. I'd happily have traded in having far less total content in favour of having more depth on the characters, especially companions. Like, Lydia has been carted around half of Skyrim, fought multiple dragons with me, and it feels weird that in that context I know basically nowt about her and our interactions are limited to orders, her explaining the title I now have two of, and me getting her to carry all the dragonbone that I'm too weedy to lug around? Also I've had characters still talk about people as if they were alive when it's literally their husband whose corpse is sitting five metres out of their door after a dragon mauled him, which is also odd. I dunno, maybe I care about companion dialogues too much, but I'd like the game to feel like there was a bit more heart/emotion in there, and I think that means more dialogue depth (I guess there's probably a billion mods for this but haven't looked into that side of it yet).
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