Baud Attitude

A few years ago, while playing Dead Rising, I realized that I could “complete” the game, and even get a reasonably good grade on the ending, simply by playing for six hours without triggering the event that unleashed the zombies into the mall.

That probably wasn’t intentional.

Similarly to Dead Rising, Skyrim has a trigger event that sets dragons loose upon the world, and it happens pretty early in the main plot.  At first, it’s actually pretty neat – you fight one pretty wimpy dragon, then dragons start showing up on occasion when you use fast travel to go places or when you’re running across the landscape, they start showing up more often and you start seeing tougher dragons… there’s a real sense of urgency and danger.

Then it gets annoying, because you can’t go 5 minutes without tripping on another scaly tail.

As an example, there was a point where I was working on trade skills – forgive me my sins – and I was regularly using fast travel to go between Whiterun and the Mage’s college at Winterhold.  If you’ve never played the game, don’t worry about the particulars, just think of them as points A and B.

Every single time I traveled to point B, then, I would have a dragon drop down on me and all the college mages would run around shouting “ERMAGAHD IT’S A DRAGON KILL IT” or similar things.

And I would kill it, and this would leave a big ol’ dragon skeleton in the courtyard of the mage’s college, and then I would do the same thing all over again the next time I needed to make the trip.

I have to assume that the college janitors got really tired of cleaning up dragon bits.  The mages never got tired of running around screaming.

So avoiding the trigger that sets off dragons has made a second play-through much more enjoyable.  I don’t have to worry about getting jumped when I travel, I can take on side quests without the sense that, somewhere, a dragon is burning a small village to the ground, and it really changes the scale of the game from EPIC FANTASY to a personal adventure.

Eventually I’ll probably go back to the first town and talk to the guy who kicks the main storyline quest into full gear.  That can wait a while, though.

Killed the Big Dang Dragon, saved the world, fulfilled my destiny as the Chosen One, brought balance to the Force, all that good stuff.  Took 68 hours, which I understand is a pretty quick run by Elder Scrolls standards.

To be honest, a good 10 hours of that was spent working on the Ultimate Set of Badarse Dragon Killing Armor and Weapons, which meant that the final boss fight was literally a 30 second affair.  Really a little embarrassing, but uniquely satisfying…

…and now I’m sorely tempted to dive right back in from the initial carriage ride into Helgen, ignore the main quest, and try a completely different play-style.  I’m going to add a couple of quality of life mods this time, though – I stuck to purely visual changes for my first run.

I have not had a particularly good history with the Elder Scrolls games.  The first one I tried, Arena, was so long ago that I actually had to install it from 1.2 MB 5.25″ floppies, and my experience with the game consisted of struggling through the godawful long install and then promptly being killed by the first rat I ran in to in the first dungeon.

The second one I tried was Morrowind, on the original Xbox, and I got a little further in that before I got swarmed by mudcrabs and died horribly.

It’s apparently been long enough for me to forgive both of those, because I decided to give Skyrim a try this weekend.

My first impressions were not good. The opening is dreary at best, the controls weren’t clicking, I didn’t like the character models, and I was pretty sure that this was going to be strike 3 for the Elder Scrolls… and then I decided, well, everyone talks about how amazing the mod community is for this game, maybe I’ll give the internet a chance to make this game something I want to play.

So, I found some high-res texture packs, and a new ragdoll engine, and some enhanced character models, and realized that I could use an Xbox 360 controller, and that let me put up with the game to the point where I made it through the introduction and got out into the world, at which point it pretty much hooked me good and proper.

…and then I installed enhanced water and snow effects, and hi-resolution foliage and lush grass, and reskinned versions of the first couple of towns, and a new skeletal engine, and found a way to turn off helmets and replace the standard armor textures with “high fantasy” (read: bikini armor) versions, and added environmental sounds for towns and dungeons and wilderness, and on and on and on.  I’m at the point where I probably shouldn’t go adding any more mods because they are at some point going to start fighting with each other, to be honest, but the end result is that everything UNDER the hood is the same, but the visuals and audio have been pumped up nicely.

I also get now why people get so sucked into the world.  I get that there’s a story and all that, and I should probably get on that, but in the meantime I just walked past a cave full of bandits and bandits always need killing.  I’ll get back to saving the world once that’s sorted out.