Tag: The Elder Scrolls

Gaming

Blog 862: The Decline

Rao Dao Zao

I had played Skyrim several times before, but never as hard and deeply as I did this time. Part of that was simply the novelty of trying to hoover up all the stuff I’d never seen before — the 74 Creation Club packs, Dawnguard — but I think most is owed to the transformative pacing of Survival Mode.

So please indulge me one last blog about Skyrim before I return to playing… literally anything else. Oh god please, let me play anything else. It’s time to let it go.

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Gaming

Blog 860: Dawnguard

Rao Dao Zao

I don’t go to an Elder Scrolls game for vampires, nor do I go to them for home ownership; that’s why I didn’t buy Dawnguard or Hearthfire at the time. (Though, given the state of the rental/housing market these days, I can appreciate why others might enjoy murdering blood-sucking parasites and taking their property.) Meanwhile I am a sucker for a Morrowind callback, so of course I got Dragonborn.

But here we are with the Anniversary Edition and all those bits I missed are part of the package. I’ve so far got a lot of enjoyment out of Skyrim‘s Survival Mode, though the rest of the Creation Club content has been a bit of a mixed bag — but how does the other tentpole expansion pack hold up?

(I have been playing for weeks and simply not found anything of consequence that is obviously from Hearthfire, so I’m not sure if that means its integration is amazingly seamless or abysmally pointless.)

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Gaming

Blog 858: Creation Club

Rao Dao Zao

I actually tend to play my Elder Scrollses completely unmodded, accepting only official expansion packs. I find it’s rare for a modder to perfectly match the fidelity of a base game — not just in terms of art style, but also in terms of balance and structure. While you can get away with a lot in Warcraft III because each map is completely self-contained, the Elder Scrolls modding experience is additive: you put more stuff into the existing open world, and that means it has to fit.

Skyrim‘s Anniversary Edition comes with 74 pieces of so-called Creation Club content, which ranges from bite-sized chunks to full-on dungeons and houses. While Survival Mode is a systemic addition that settles across the whole world like it was always meant to be there, a number of other packs struggle to conform.

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Gaming

Blog 857: Surviving Skyrim (Anniversary Edition)

Rao Dao Zao

I have so many problems with Skyrim, but there’s still something compelling about it. Maybe the simple act of trudging through an expansive wilderness, replete with ancient ruins to explore, is enough to carry all its weaker elements.

Well, whatever — the legendary game that has been re-released more times than you’ve had hot dinners is at it again, and has finally appeared DRM-free on gog. I have to admit, this is the signal I’ve been waiting for to give it another go; I didn’t get all the expansion packs the first time around (only Dragonborn), and nor have I seen the visual upgrades of the Special Edition or the reams of “Creation Club” micro-packs that came after that.

Here we go again…

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Gaming

Blog 798: Oblivion Awaits

Rao Dao Zao

The last time I did a wee Elder Scrolls binge, I played Morrowind and then went straight to Skyrim. I’ve never had much of a thing for Oblivion; while I find Skyrim‘s viking aesthetic reasonably boring, it’s not half as boring as Oblivion‘s extremely straight trad-fantasy trappings. But these feelings come and go regardless of how your conscious mind might object, and sometimes you just need to float around grassy hills and bash some glass-hammer-wielding minotaurs.

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Gaming

Blog 759: The Guilds of Morrowind

Rao Dao Zao

According to this blog, I last played Morrowind a whopping seven years ago. How can a game linger on in your mind for such periods of time? By all means, it’s a massive game and so is best reconsumed after long breaks, but even across such gulfs it is never far from my mind.

Well, for whatever reason, those thoughts bubbled closer and closer to the surface and I could resist no more. I got out my old GOTY edition CDs, lay the printed map on the desk beside me, and stepped into Vvardenfell once again…

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Gaming

Blog 587: Dragonblog

Rao Dao Zao

They always say “never meet your heroes”, but I get the impression they should also say “never attempt to rebuild your heroes” because it invariably doesn’t work. I might gripe about bits and pieces of Skyrim but overall I enjoy it, though after 50-odd hours it gets a bit samey. The answer to such saminess? Why, an expansion pack!

The Dragonborn DLC is more than a year old now, but fuelled by a desire for just a bit more variety and not yet ready to drop this unhealthy but oh-so-addictive game, I was enticed to pick up this pack because it’s set on Solstheim, that same snowy place first brought to us in the Morrowind expansion pack Bloodmoon. A pack of which I enjoyed many elements, sure, though (guess what?) I found the frigid landscape just a teensy bit monotonous.

Oh well, that’s what disposable income is for. Let’s see if a little bit of mechanically-recovered Morrrowind magic can liven up the drab chill of Skyrim…

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