Category: Gaming

I should have recorded last night’s game of 7 Days to Die with Max and Luke. Particularly the raid on the Shotgun Messiah factory in the wasteland. It was pretty epic.

We met while on the way. I had just dug up a buried treasure in the desert. Me on my motorcycle, them in the 4×4, when we got to the factory we had a time just clearing out the parking lot. Several zombears, many birds, and a dozen zeds. I reminded them that the respawn timer in the wasteland is 0 – for every deado we kill, another one will respawn.

We tried to follow the path through the factory but sometimes it was easier to beat a door down to see what’s around us. Sometimes the zombies did the destruction. At one point we had to swim through a flooded section and we had trouble getting out of the water. Luke and Max could pole up on frames, but for some reason I wasn’t able to get high enough in the water to get a frame under me. I had to place ladder frames on Luke’s blocks and climb up. While I was struggling with that, they were dealing with the zombies in the room above me. I did make it up in time to help them take out the zombies, though.

We reached an office space filled with cubicles and undead businessmen and cleared it out, and we were only one floor above ground level, so we jumped out to dump all the loot we’d collected in the car, then climbed back to where we were. Found a storage area and cleared it out, and there was a ramp made from the collapsed ceiling up to the next floor. It was unclear how to proceed. Nighttime was coming so we decided to hole up there. Luke tried to block off the ramp but we could hear a witch (screamer zombie who calls in another horde if she sees a player) and sure enough she saw us and we had a mini-horde on our hands. Cleared them out, and by then it was night, when the zombies get faster and meaner.

Tried to block the door to the stairwell but we had a constant line of undead coming up to us. Luke and Max started taking out the stairs so they wouldn’t see a path to us. I stood watch looking down the stairwell. At one point a bear charged up the stairs to us but we made short work of it. Luke ran out of gas for his auger so they switched to pickaxes, much slower going, while Max and I fired on the advancing army of the dead.

I tried to reach for a loot bag that dropped just beyond where we were breaking down the cement stairs, and fell almost all the way to the bottom, and had to run and jump back up to our perch with the decaying non-people right behind me.

With the dawn we proceeded upward. Hit a section of the factory where there were huge metal tanks with hatches on top and through them, surrounded by catwalks, that led out to a lower-than-the-top roof but it was a dead end (pun intended) so we had to circle around to find another way up. We gave up, though, and tried to build pillars and ladders to skip to the roof. Max fell, hurt himself, and quickly found himself surrounded by brain-eating zombies. Luke and I were way up on the very top, eyeing the loot. I went back down and saw Max limping around, sure he was going to die, chased by radioactive zombies and acid-puking zombies and dogs and everything else. If it wasn’t so dire it would have been hilarious (OK it was actually hilarious.) A cop zobmie took out our ladder up, stranding Luke. Max found a room he could barricade himself in so I ran in to bandage him up, but he still had two broken limbs.

Once we’d cleared a break in the waves of attakers, we made it to the loot on the roof. Found a chainsaw, an assault rifle, and a bunch of food, and some good schematics, among the other loot. Totally worth it. And nobody died.

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As of today, about an hour ago, I collected my last achievement in Skyrim. Not even the Special Edition. Oldrim, the original.

Paid a guy online to transfer my saves to PC, bought a second copy of the game, and kept going. I’ve played stealth archer builds, magic-only builds. I’ve played it vanilla, I’ve modded it. I thought I’d done it all. I always assumed I was in it for the story and the immersion and that I didn’t care about being a completist. Figured I just had some Hearthfire achievements to get and didn’t care.

When the Special Edition came out, I started another whole playthrough, too, so there are another 150+ hours on a brand-new character.

When the Special Edition came out, I started another whole playthrough, too, so there are another 150+ hours on a brand-new character.

But… a couple of weeks ago I decided to see what achievements I still had left to get. There were 12: two of the College of Winterhold quests (despite me having done that whole quest chain at least three times; not sure why those were in there); a couple of crime-related ones like having a 1000 septim bounty in every hold or escaping from jail; fighting a legendary dragon, which, again, I am almost certain I have done several times on my highest-level ‘toon (level 81); craft something from stalhrim; and the aforementioned house-building achievements.

I’m done. But that doesn’t mean I’ve spent my last hour in Skyrim. I will return.

I love this game.

Some of the funniest moments I’ve had in Skyrim were almost assuredly completely unplanned by the people who designed it.

Skyrim, like the previous titles in the series, or the other major gameworld from Bethesda, the Fallout series, uses scripts to tell all the various characters in the game where to be at certain times of the day, and how to react to events around them, and to moderate how each person feels about the player and the player’s actions.

Radiant Quests, Repeating Forever

Many of the basic quests available to the player are also randomly generated. There’s a list of quest-givers, a list of random loot or rewards, and a long list of possible locations for these quests. This is the Radiant system, and it adds a certain amount of unpredictability to every playthrough.

The game is big, with far too many moving parts, with everything governed by an interlocking set of scripts and triggers, all built on top of an engine that has been expanded and patched over the years. Toss all that together with an unpredictable human player who has been given the freedom to go anywhere, talk to (or kill) almost anyone in the game. You end up with a system that mostly works, but can break pretty easily.

Some of those breaks are predictable and repeatable and become exploits that a gamer can use (or not, if they would rather). And some of those breaks are chaotic, unpredictable, and hilarious. These bugs create some of my favorite moments in the game.

The Unbound Dremora

On one of my most recent playthroughs, I’ve been playing a pure mage, eschewing swords and armor for spells and potions. My character had been only using the various schools of magick to attack, defend, or otherwise complete quests. And eventually she had maxed out her skill in conjuration, the ability to summon things and creatures from other planes of existence.

Having reached this level, there was only one thing left to do: approach the instructor for conjuration at the College of Winterhold basically to complete my degree. The instructor gave me a ritual to perform: summon a dremora (a creature of the plane of Oblivion with great power), defeat it in combat three times, and order it to bring back some powerful artifact. All this, I did, and ran off to give the artifact to the instructor, Phinis Gestor.

Some time later, maybe a week or more in real time, my character was returning to the College to sell off a bunch of loot I’d found, and heard a noise behind me as I entered the dorms. I turned around, and came face to face with the red devil face of the unbound dremora I’d summoned earlier.

The dremora was not hostile. In fact, it seemed listless, quiet, almost depressed. Instead of bellowing threats, it said nothing at all. As I watched, it wandered across the atrium and up the stairs to the second floor. I ran after it, curious, but only watched as it went out the door to the roof. I couldn’t stop laughing. Apparently I’d forgotten to dismiss it after I was done.

That dremora is still there, on the roof, staring out to the horizon, stuck here, unable to leave or return to its home dimension. I’ve even tried attacking it to see if killing it will dispell it. Nope. It’s glitched out. It’s immune to attack, and it will not fight back. The College has gained another student, or a mascot.

Unpredictability Is Fun

A downside to the Radiant system is that after a while, these Radiant quests become boring and repetitive, despite the randomness, because they all boil down to “go fetch this thing for me”. It’s clearly not special to that NPC because they keep losing some random weapon or piece of armor in some other random tomb, cave, or dungeon, and only the player can go there and find it for them again.

I assumed that the unbound dremora should disappear, or at least become an enemy you can fight (and loot), after completing the quest. Its persistence is a bug, one that should have been fixed by a patch (and is fixed by the Unofficial Skyrim Patch, a crowd-sourced update provided by fans of the game). But it’s much funnier to have it hang around, observe, and act depressed at its fate.

In almost 1,200 hours in Skyrim, I have never played a Khajiit, Argonian, Orc, or any kind of Elf.

I don’t know what it means. I’ve just never had the urge to play a non-human. I have played an Imperial, a Nord, at least twice as a Redguard, and several Bretons.

From a lore standpoint – oh, maybe I should explain that further, what it means to say something like “from a lore standpoint”?

The Elder Scrolls universe started out as a Dungeons and Dragons type of universe, with elves and orcs and humans and magic, but as it’s developed over the years, it has built on its basic Tolkein-esque High Fantasy foundations and has acquired an extensive and deep history.

Who Lives in Skyrim?

The basic humans have become several different races with their own cultures and special abilities. Nords, warriors from the cold wastes of Skyrim. Bretons, who are courtly and full of intrigue and may have a bit of Mer in their background. Redguards, desert nomads with a penchant for piracy and smuggling. And Imperials from the great human Empire at the starry heart of the continent of Tamriel.

The elves have differentiated into the Mer: Altmer, haughty, proud, and more than a little oppressive towards everyone else; the Dunmer, a reclusive culture that worship their ancestors and a triumvirate of demigods; the Bosmer, cannibalistic carnivores who live in mobile giant tree cities. And the Dwemer, who tinkered with magic and science and who conducted an experiment a thousand years ago that probably wiped the entire race out in a single swift mystical extinction event but left their ruins and artifacts laying around everywhere.

And then there are the “beast races”, the Orcs, the cat-like Khajiit, and the lizard folk Argonians, each with their own culture and history and spot on the map to call their own.

Environments Tell Stories

Shortly after becoming immersed in the game of Skyrim, I discovered that there was a lot of backstory I was missing, and, like any new fan, I would spend hours prowling the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Page and Elder Scrolls wikis, and read posts and threads on the Reddit group TESLore. Timelines, famous historical people and places, demigods and demons. It was endlessly fascinating to me, and the more I learned, the more I realized it was all reflected and expanded by material I found in the game.

So many books. In the game. If my character found a bookshelf, each book on the shelf could be opened and read. Some were in-universe fiction. Some were in-universe history. Plays, journals by explorers. Even erotica. It can all be found, read, collected. Some would start off quests of their own, tracking down a powerful weapon or rescuing trapped adventurers.

Bethesda, the company that writes and produces the games, is an expert in what they call environmental storytelling. In a dungeon you can find a journal that fills in what someone was looking for, and then a little further on, you find a body, killed by an unforeseen trap just inches from achieving their goal, and a story, with a beginning, middle, and end is told, economically. And this kind of thing happens over and over and over again. Without leading your character along specific path, you gain insight into the living world you’re adventuring in. It’s beautiful, and beautifully done.

Meaning From Small Scenes

One of the first examples of this that I found in the game, on my first character, was near the starting tutorial area. My character, out exploring, found a path that lead up from the road into the woods. The path led to a small underhang on a cliff face, with a statue of Talos, the founder of the human Empire who was worshipped as a god, and a shrine. And laying around the shrine were bodies labelled “worshiper”, dead, in pools of their own blood, wearing simple clothing, unarmored, weaponless.

Alongside those bodies is an Aldmeri agent, in his distinctive dark purple and gold robes, also dead. On his body can be found a note titled Thalmor orders, which explains that the Thalmor are rooting out, arresting and executing any Talos worshippers they can find. The note is signed by Elenwen, an ambassador who shows up later as a real NPC during the middle stages of the main quest.

One dead Thalmor, four dead human worshippers, and a motivation gleaned from a small notes.

A player seeing this scene can make a choice. They can just loot everything and move on; those robes alone are worth a couple of hundred gold pieces. They can feel empathy for the worshippers. They can side with the Thalmor and feel disgust for the humans who think a mere man can rise to godhood, clearly a heretical thought. All of those choices are open, none of them have any direct benefit or effect in pure game mechanics. To a role-player, though, the scene gives a chance to insert their character into an ongoing narrative, and expands on the feeling that the land of Skyrim is a living one with lots going on.

Building Character

What did I do the first time I saw this scene? I can’t remember but I probably looted everything and moved on, tucking the note away to save it for my collection. But it moved me, and I felt a tiny bit of sympathy for the dead worshippers, and it motivated me to look more closely at this whole Talos crackdown. I was still new to this world and history. I didn’t know enough.

My reaction the next time I saw it, however, was through the eyes of a different character, a Nord who was returning to their homeland to fight the fascist Aldmeri Dominion and their Thalmor agents. I had a visceral reaction to it, and it shaped my new character’s story, motivating her to join the Stormcloaks under Jarl Ulfric in Windhelm, taking a side in the civil war tearing Skyrim apart.

Skyrim, more than any other game I’ve played, encourages that kind of role-playing. That’s the standard that leads people to put hundreds and hundreds of hours into playing.

5 years ago this month, I discovered The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and I’ve never stopped playing it since.

Traditionally we celebrate Thanksgiving by going to their beach house in Lincoln City and spend the whole four-day weekend, and that year, Bill and Max had brought their XBox down because they were both addicted to Skyrim, which had been released just a couple of weeks earlier. I watched them play, and I played a little bit myself, and it was impressive as Hell.

At one point Max decided he wanted to fight two dragons at the same time, as a way to up the challenge. So he fast-travelled to somewhere near Darkwater Crossing, hoping to trigger a random dragon on top of the one that lived in the hot springs of Eastmarch.

He got his wish, and the dragon fighting music started up, and the fight began.

And somehow, somehow, another dragon showed up. Two dragons are a challenge. Three dragons was epic. I cheered Max on as he died several times before eventually bringing defeat and stealing the souls of those three dragons.

My Turn to Play Skyrim

When I got home from the trip, I went out and bought a used Playstation 3 and a copy of Skyrim to play on my giant plasma TV, and promptly fell headlong into the game for that entire winter. And then some.

I would play all night and drag myself to work on a complete lack of sleep and try not to regale my co-workers with Skyrim stories. Meeting the talking dog. Going on a cross-province adventure retracing my steps after blacking out from a drinking contest with the demigod of debauchery. Meeting the mind behind the mysterious and reclusive hermits that train you to shout as a weapon. The spooky night I finally explored a Dwemer ruin and saw the pathetic creatures that had been their slaves, the Falmer.

And plenty of dragons. Always an awesome battle to fight dragons. I never had the bad luck Max did; one at a time was always plenty for me. But the game didn’t run so well on Playstation. There were memory leaks and for such a huge, open world, it pushed the hardware much further than it had any right to.

Is that dragonfly… carrying my horse?

I had about 250+ hours on my first character, a Redguard with no backstory (because I didn’t really know that was a thing to do yet), when I got my first, and last, dragon spawn inside a city. Poor Riften. I assumed so many people were going to die that day, decimating that town. What I couldn’t foresee was that it was my hardware that wouldn’t survive. The game slowed to a crawl, becoming a slideshow, and finally the whole thing just shut down completely. My used PS3 would never start up again. Skyrim killed it dead.

So Good I Bought It Twice

But I still had more Skyrim to play. It wasn’t too long after that I purchased a Windows 7 license and installed it on a BootCamp partition on my MacBook Pro, just to see if I could get Skyrim to run. I bought the game a second time, this time from Steam. It ran on medium display settings, even though the fans on my laptop would run up to jet-airliner-taking-off sound levels. I found someone who could break the Sony DRM on my PS3 save files and kept playing my original character, finishing every quest, visiting every named location, and becoming leader of every single guild. He became a dragon-riding all-conquering badass.

Matla is pleased

So I started new characters, to do it all over again. I installed mods to make it run better, fix problems, and add new items, clothing, characters, and locations to the game. And when Skyrim Special Edition came out last month, I started a brand-new character, this time with a backstory and a goal, and I’ve added another 100+ hours to my total play time, which is now approaching 1,200.

I’ve defeated Alduin, the world-eater, several times. I’ve played the DLCs through at least twice each, discovering the island of Solstheim and the beautiful Forgotten Vale, and I’ve built my own home from quarried stone and lumber I’ve chopped myself. All in simulation.

A Short Skyrim Series

There’s always something to do in Skyrim, some place to explore, some story to tease out of the left-behind books or notes or snippets of conversation, or some new thing to craft from found materials. I can spend time just gathering butterfly wings and blue mountain flowers for a potion, or go hunting dragons, or anything in between.

Over the next several posts, just for fun, I’m going to write about some of the funny, sad, and touching moments I’ve had playing this silly game. I can’t believe how much I’ve gotten out of wandering around the snowy frozen norther province of Tamriel, home of Men, Mer, Khajiit, Argonians, and other even stranger beasties.