Skyrim sees you, the player,
become Dragonborn, someone who can commune with dragons, is the kin of
dragons... and just goes around murdering a bunch of dragons. But let’s be
honest, doing all that Dragonborn shit, like saving the world from Alduin, can
wait until you have become leader of the companions, Archmage of the college of
Winterhold, stolen everything and killed everyone –including the Emperor of
Cyrodiil. Seriously, it did actually get to the point where I was walking to
the next dungeon looking for some artefact or another when I realised...
there’s this badass dragon that I’m meant to be killing and saving the world...
and I’m dicking around with some bandits in a cave!
In all seriousness the actual storyline follows the Dragonborn in their
pursuit of super evil Worldeater dragon Alduin. You travel far and wide in
order to track him down and kill him and save the world. Not really a spoiler
for a remastered game and not surprising that you, the playable character, wins
the day.
Graphically it’s stunning to look at and it’s awesome being able to see
a mountain in the distance and knowing you can climb it. However, this is a
Bethesda game so that means glitches and lots of them. There was one thing that
bugged me when I played the game on the 360 and this was in relation to the
quests you receive. One quest fucked up and pointed me to a dead end in a
castle because I had completed a questline which killed off some NPC dude that
I was meant to talk to. I thought to myself, the remastered edition will fix
this, but I wasn’t willing to risk it so I made sure I did the specific quest
first to get it out of the way... only to have another quest glitch out along
the way. For fuck’s sake. It was nowhere near as bad as the Borderlands glitch though.
There is so much more I can say about this game and I could go on and
on for days. But there is one thing other that caused me to become irrationally
irritated, related to your optional family. I married Ysolda who is a typical
Nordic lady and is very lovely. But I am a giant lizard with horns. What part
of her went, ‘thank you for that mammoth tusk. I know we aren’t the same
species but that’s a lovely amulet so let’s get married.’ It’s not just the cross-species
issue, but as soon as you marry her, she turns into a wet blanket who never
leaves the house and doesn’t seem to care if I fuck off for weeks at a time
exploring dungeons and shit. Also, she didn’t seem to care when I started
spending all my time with some girl vampire who I have an unnatural connection
with.
There are technically three DLCs from the 360 version that are incorporated
into the main game. Dragonborn sees you travel to Solsthiem which is an island
off the coast of Morrowind – so much so that you are actually treated to a bit
of Morrowind theme music during your time here.
You are on the trail of Mirrack, another Dragonborn who is evil in his
own sort of way and imprisoning the inhabitants of Solsthiem.
The other story one Is Dawnguard where you join the vampire hunters...
or join forces with a vampire. Either way, you get to buddy up with the saucy
but repetitive Serana, a vampire who will join you to fight against the
vampires. You develop what I only describe as an overly inappropriate
friendship if you chose to get married earlier in the game as I’ve mentioned
above. While you are travelling with her, she has about three one-liners which
she constantly says over and over again to the point where I just wanted to cut
her into little pieces.
Achievements – 1,550 Points – 75
Achievements
I personally invested over 200 hours getting the achievements for this
one and the chances are if you are playing it, you will go out of your way to
tick them all off. So what are the most notable ones?
Well first off, there is an achievement for having 100,000 gold. This
much gold will see you through the painful process of building houses later on.
Actually building the houses is what nearly screwed me out of the 100%. It
turns out that if you do the Dark Brotherhood questline before building the
house in Falkreath, you run the risk of locking yourself out of being able to
build it at all. I thankfully managed to reload an earlier save to finish off
this arduous task.
It is proper repetitive too. You have to build three houses in total
and getting the materials, doing the building and buying the land are really
boring. It was boring as a standalone DLC and it was boring here too.
Speaking of the Dark Brotherhood, 3 of the achievements for completing
their questline are missable as you can attack them and get a quest for
destroying the Dark Brotherhood which replaces doing their missions.
Another missable one, which I found fuckassingly annoying was the one
for collecting all of the Deadric items. Without a guide, you could quite
easily cock this up without realising. The most notable of these is the Masque
of Calvicus Vile which you actually get for ignoring the request of Calvicus to
kill a dog. I spent the early part
of the game smashing these out as much as my level cap would allow.
Another missable one is for capturing Fort Greenwall or Fort Sunguard
which is the half way point of the Civil War questline. Apparently you can lock
this out if you progress too far through the main story without starting the
civil war quests. As I concentrated on doing anything but the main story, I didn’t experience this issue.
A few other notable ones include killing a Legendary Dragon. This is
harder than it may seem because in order to spawn a Legendary Dragon you have
to be level 78. The hard part isn’t killing the dragon, it’s getting to this
level.
In the 360 you could use a skill book called the Oghma Infinium over
and over again to level up. This was a glitch which could be exploited by using
a bookshelf and reading the book from the shelf. Bethesda didn’t fix the
possibility of glitched quests but they did decide to remove this handy bit
from the remastered version. Funny, that. Thankfully there are other ways to
get to 78 and the way I did was by exploiting fast travel with an illusion
spell that tricks the game into thinking your using illusion while fast
travelling. You level up the one skill to reach 78 reall quickly by rinsing and
repeating this.
The last achievement I unlocked was for completing the Lost to Ages
quest which isn’t overly difficult but it is really long and convoluted, at the
end of which you get an item that would probably have benefitted me if I had
got it about 100 in-game hours earlier.
Downloadable Content – N/A
So to sum up, Skyrim is one
of the only games I would play again even after getting all of the achievements.
I wouldn’t play as a lizard again though. He seemed to die far more easily than
the Nord counterpart. The next time I have a spare 200 hours, I’ll dive back
in.
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