That's the way I remember it and it's most likely wrong. That, and, after a while these games were simply "done", there were no more patches, DLC or anything that would force you to keep updating your game.
Skyrim had two major expansions (I refuse to count Hearthfire, building a fucking house and adopting children is NOT a fucking expansion! And why the FUCK would I want to settle down, get married and have kids in a game about exploration, adventure and dragonslaying?) and the Legendary Edition had only been released last month. This thing is still going strong.
The possibility to modify my game in any way I want is the biggest reason for me to play Skyrim (and to not really care about Elder Scrolls Online). Aside from the obvious texture and quality mods, which make the game look better than real life, there are tons of things I've added to the game, some of them self-made, which make the game infinitely more fun to me, make it unique, different from any other Skyrim out there.
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| Vanilla. It's still very pretty. |
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| Modded. Prettier. |
In my game, characters have visible bleeding cuts if their unarmored body parts are hit by a sword. Or a bruise from a blunt weapon. There are all kinds of different wounds and blood splatters depending on the weapons, armor and clothing involved. Completely unnecessary, but fun and immersive all the same. In my game, NPCs will react to weather effects and go inside when it rains and wear cloaks and hoods when it's cold and wet. In my game, werewolves can turn back and forth at will, not just once pay day and only for an hour. And characters aren't Barbie & Ken underneath their clothes. Not because I'm perving over video games, but because in my world, underwear isn't fucking glued on.
Some people take their need for realism so far, they mod their game so that their avatar needs to eat, drink and sleep, lest they suffer all kinds of bad side-effects or even death. Bit too harsh for me. Keep a fish in your inventory for three days and it'll go bad. Eat it and your character gets sick. Drink water from any random river without boiling it - sick again. Drink twelve bottles of wine in one sitting - dead. And if that isn't realistic enough, some people have seriously added the need to piss in form of a mod. Because interrupting gameplay for RL pissing isn't annoying enough already.
One problem with these modifications is that they need to be updated when you update your game. They can turn unstable, cause issues in combination with other mods and so forth. And keeping well over 200 mods up to date is, well... not fun.
I keep Skyrim on an old, secondary Steam profile, no auto-updates or anything. I don't want this game touching anything else, I don't want auto updates to fuck with it, I need a safe, sterile environment. And after finishing Dawnguard, the first expansion, I made a decision: No more game updates at all! Skyrim was reasonably stable (as stable as this game can get), my mods worked the way they were supposed to work, let's not risk breaking anything.
Well, that was last year. Then they released Dragonborn. Same weak storytelling as always, lots of bugs, crashes and problems, but overall fun to play, critics said. I chose to ignore it. Then I ran out of stuff to do on there, had the whole map uncovered, every dungeon explored, every side quest, every guild, brotherhood, blah, blah, I was all done and didn't want to start over. Then, Falskaar:
Can you believe this is a mod created by some 19 year old kid, who claims he can produce an expansion with the same quality and added gameplay as Bethesda themselves? This mod is his job application. What I've seen of this so far is absolutely amazing, a few minor typos and grammar issues aside (both of which also exist in Bethesda's original writing).
So. I had nothing left to do in my game. Dragonborn and Falskaar were waiting. So I thought, heck with it, let's update this fucker and give it a go. Damn you, Steam Summer Sale!
Naturally, in order to play all this new content, I had to download the latest game updates. If you're unfamiliar with modding, let me tell you what this means:
Many of the game's modifications and plugins require advances programs, so-called script extenders, which allow the game to do things it normally would not do, i.e. map certain new functions to a hotkey or advanced NPC commands that go beyond "follow me" and "wait here".
If you update Skyrim, said script extenders will no longer recognize the game and cease to work. Basically, all you have to do is update your script extenders along with Skyrim. But that's where the problems start. One of these extenders ('Dragon Script') has been discontinued, so I could not update it. Without an update, it would not work on an updated Skyrim and without the extender, half of my mods would refuse to work. So I had to re-download and reconfigure all of these mods, which were now all using different setups and settings due to the now defunct Dragon Script.
Unfortunately, the website hosting all of these mods, Skyrim Nexus, was in the process of migrating data servers, causing 90% of the downloads to be unavailable unless you registered for a paid premium account. It only cost me about two fifty, but yes, I had to pay money in order to fix my broken mods.
One problem with installing, fixing and reconfiguring a huge load of stuff is that Skyrim may just freeze after a few seconds, refuse to load savegames, crash or just refuse to start up altogether. I had all of these problems in every possible variation. No surprise here.
Now there's a handy little tool named 'BOSS', which is supposed to put all your mods in the right load order, points out compatibility issues and outdated, broken and obsolete mods. So I went and ran BOSS and lo and behold, it put my mods in an order, which allowed me to fire up Skyrim without immediately crashing it. But that's about it.
Not only had it fixed my stability issues by re-arranging all my crap, but it had stopped half of my stuff from working. My main character was missing his head. My companion still had hers, but her hood had disappeared. I could no longer run, because I was suddenly overburdened, either because my stuff got heavier or my carrying capacity got reduced. Still haven't figured out how that happened. And those were only the most glaring, obvious problems.
I have spent the rest of that night manually rearranging my mods until they all worked again. The missing head problem was the most fun one. It was related to a defunct helmet mod, which would only work if you loaded it before any mod that would alter the stats of any helmet in any way, but after any other custom headgear. Or the other way 'round. Or something. I dunno, it took several hours of research and trial & error.
When I finally had all of that shit sorted, I tried to actually play the game. But whenever I tried to loot something, the game would crash. A problem with the new UI and its load order. When I fixed it, various hotkeys and HUD elements ceased to work, because they depended on the new UI and had to be rearranged, as well. Now my game stopped crashing, but every minute or so, it just froze for ten seconds, then resumed to work. Would happen for ten or so minutes, then freeze up completely. Turns out a "compatibility patch", which BOSS told me to download for one of my sound mods, was causing these freezes, so I had to remove it and play without it.
I finally made it to the Dragonborn expansion area when the game seemed to work okay. And it crashed. A lot. Turns out I had too many companions and the follower mod wasn't compatible with Dragonborn. So I got rid of my followers. Unfortunately, my savegame got corrupted and I had to start over from an older savegame. Having lost some progress, I had to repeat the last dungeon I finished before starting the expansion.
Here's the important bit: In my original savegame, an NPC told me about the dungeon, so I went there, got a new dragon shout, killed a dragon priest, got his cool mask, yay.
On the backup savegame, nobody told me about the dungeon, but I still knew where it was, went there without ever having heard of it, approached the wall with the dragon shout and... crashed.
You see, basically you learn new dragon shouts (special ability thingies) by staring at a wall with the shout engraved, the screen goes wobbly and BAM - new shout! When I went there, well... BAM - crash to desktop!
Just triggering the damn thing would crash my game every time! I could briefly peek at the wall, fast-travel to a nearby city and ten seconds later I'd still crash. Logical assumption: One of my mods conflicts with dragon shouts.
I've disabled, deactivated, uninstalled, fixed and reinstalled another ton of mods, most of which were somehow related to visual effects like night eye, werewolf vision, stuff that lets you see in the dark and what not. Because word walls trigger a visual effect, I figured there was some sort of conflict right there, but the fucking thing would keep on crashing. Kept me busy all day.
Yeah. It wasn't a mod. It's the fucking game. You're not supposed to beat this dungeon, let alone find the dragon shout, without being told about it first. So I sat around in town all day, waited for random passing NPCs to tell me about the place (only comes up as a rumor in random NPC talk) and nobody mentioned it ever again. No dungeon for me. Boo!
The good news is, my game is fully patched and updated now, I have all the expansions and DLC and I'm hoping there will never ever be any more updates, patches and DLC again, because I don't wanna have to go through all of this shit again in this life.
Also, Dragonborn is pretty fun, if clearly aimed at stupid people. Half of the time when I find a new dungeon, a cave or some other potential explorable content, the whole thing will end at a locked door. "Key required", it tells me. The game doesn't want me to explore anything until the story clearly tells me to actually do so in the first place. So much hand-holding and on-rails gameplay!
Dragonborn also features the most ridiculous espionage plot in RPG history.
When exploring Raven Rock, the expansion's first town, I walked into a family's house. They didn't stop me, they didn't seem to mind, acted all friendly and as I rummaged through the stuff in their basement, they started talking upstairs. Basically, the kid called her dad "father" in quotes, daddy called mommy his "wife" in quotes (the subtitles had actual quotes, but you could also hear them in the dialogue) and the game made it pretty clear that these guys were just pretending to be a family for the sake of some sinister plot or something.
The funny thing is, when I came back upstairs, they kept on arguing among each other like I wasn't even there, clearly not giving a shit about how they just revealed themselves to me. Mkay.
A few hours later into the game, a quest NPC told me that there were spies among the villagers, who were plotting to assassinate someone. Hmmm... now which of the villagers could possibly be the spies? Derp!
What's even more annoying than the fact that the game already revealed the whole thing hours before the actual quest, was how I could not tell the quest NPC what I knew. I fucking KNEW who the assassins were, they openly talked about it right in front of me, yet there was no dialogue option other than, "Any leads?" and "What can I do?"
It gets better. The quest giver told me to talk to the local tavernkeep, who immediately told me: "Yeah, the spies you're looking for is the suchandsuch family." You know, the guys who already told me hours ago, anyway.
Okay. So those spies talk about being spies in front of other people. They're so shitty with their secret identity, even the village idiot knows they're spies. Why the fuck do they even need my help to solve this "mystery"? Oh yeah! "We can't do anything without hard evidence."
You know what the quest NPC did? He gave me a key to the spy family's house. A fucking key. Why would he even have one? And why would I need one, for that matter? I've been in their house before, it wasn't locked, and they didn't even care when I came to visit!
So I went back to the house and the moment I stepped inside, the whole family attacked me. Why? They didn't know I was sent there to find evidence. They knew me. They were friendly with me until that step of the quest. They had no fucking reason to attack. And lo and behold, daddy dropped a key when he died, which opened a safe in the basement, which contained a piece of paper saying, "Yeah, we're gonna kill that guy when the time is right."
If I needed a perfect example for awful storytelling, this would be it. And the quest had so much potential! Think about it: There's a spy among the villagers and I have to reveal him before he assassinates someone. If I screw up, I may get the wrong guy arrested or even executed AND the real spy might still kill his target! How cool is that? Watch people, gather evidence, figure out who's behind all this. Proper RPG moments.
Nope. Bartender: "Yeah, it's those three guys over there, here's a key to their house!"
Oh well. Nobody plays Elder Scrolls games for their plot. I'm having fun and I'm happy the damn game finally works.
-Cat
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