#it's not even a skill issue. there is no skill in skyrim combat after a point >:(

[unsettlingcreature]

i have baldur's gate 3 at home...................

[level1cleric]

finally finished dragon's dogma 2. it... really is the most 7/10 game i have played in a while. the very basics of what the main story has to offer, it's sufficient. it moves things forward, even if at times it has some issues trying to describe the breadth of what its trying to convey. the game really shines in the world that you play in, and how much there is possible, but is held back by a certain design philosophy that seems to carry over from the first game.

the world is BIG, traversable by foot, by cart, or by teleport stones you have to set up yourself (for the most part). and it's full of people! people who have their own lives going on. and so much can be MISSED unless you go looking for it.

the game has multiple classes you can learn and swap between 10 in total. 4 at the start, 2 unlocked early by a sidequest, and the other 4 are unlocked individually by finding the right people. and these people are way out of the way sometimes! so a sizeable chunk of your gameplay possibilities for combat can be missed.

for each class, there's a maister, you're introduced to the fighter maister at the start, and each maister has a supreme skill for their class. get buddy-buddy with them, and they'll give it to you. that's 10 people you have to find and befriend to unlock all the skills (if you wanna max out all classes) (not required) (i'm more upset about the locked classes)

there are several people you meet once who have deep backstories and side quests, but unless you go find them again after your one chance encounter, you'd never know that. there are certain monsters that spawn in the far reaches of the world, but if only stick to where the main story takes you, you'd never know that. there's really cool worldbuilding, with elves and dwarves, human and beastren relations, diplomatic relations between countries, the cultural differences between human and Pawn relations, the Sphinx segments, whatever the fuck is going on with the Brine, its- augh

its like that saying "if a game is mediocre in a deep way it will stick with you forever." i recommend it right now for people who love wandering around rpgs like skyrim for ages and maxing out everything. i'd recommend it more if it had a full and proper post game like it's predecessor had Dark Arisen, so if that comes out in a year i'll share that around.

grab it on sale, take your time, it's got a lot to offer, but try not to rush through it. i think i got impatient with it and messed up my own experience with it, but i don't think that should be a mark against it.

[lunarleylines]

As someone who got it via Xbox Game Pass and has been playing it off and on for the last week-ish on my aging PC, I think I can understand a lot of the real problems that are keeping it from getting anywhere, so I will rant about it after the cut, but TLDR; they bit off way more than they could chew, and the lack of clean-up in almost every area of the game is too big to overlook for most people to find the interesting stuff underneath.

Only one companion at a time??? You can get several people on your ship at once, depending on circumstances, but only one can join you at any time, so no party banter, and I guess you could swap people constantly if you want to progress stories?? Is that how it was in Skyrim? I haven't played it since closer to when that came out, so maybe I'm skewed by older Fallout and playing BG3 a lot recently.

The companions you do get (from what I've seen so far), are kinda bland, honestly, and that's a tragedy when it's such a big part of this kind of game.

The pacing of absolutely everything is wildly inconsistent, that's the best I can summarize that.

Other people have mentioned it, but the skill trees and challenges are sort of wild. The fact that a lot of "starter" skills are locked behind you learning and boosting other skills several levels is weird as hell. The challenges aren't always that big of a deal, but that's mostly because some of them are really straightforward (pick X locks to boost your lockpicking), but it still is both boosting a skill and also leveling up overall.

There is a negligible level of explanation for most things in the game, if at all. I learned things from watching TikToks before ever touching the game that I still haven't seen any reference to in-game (like being able to transfer items to and from your ship if you're within like 250m of it, via selecting the ship in your menu, and viewing the Cargo).

Purely rant, but connected to the previous point, I still don't know how to use a boost-pack in the game. They make a point of giving you one during the main story quest lines (like they give you one and call out giving you one), you can equip it immediately if you don't already have one, and then there is absolutely no indication anywhere of how to use it. Maybe I can check key-binds for it if I remember, but it's frustrating that I'll have to resort to that.

I already mentioned running on an aging PC, so it certainly doesn't run its best on my computer, but after looking into the issues I'm having, I've discovered it's a pretty widespread series of issues, and the idea of "looks pretty and runs 60fps" is only true to a certain extent. The biggest thing is that seemingly unless the game is fully installed on an internal, high-speed SSD on top of having high end components otherwise (and even then in a lot of cases), you're most likely going to have issues with lag where you try to talk to an NPC, their mouth moves in a series of motions like talking, and then 1-10 seconds later, the audio kicks in, usually after their mouth has stopped moving again entirely. Oh, and in sudden combat, all of the sounds will get hitched against each other, music will cut in and out, and everything will just be wildly incoherent and out of sync for who knows how long.

Connected to last point, I'm legitimately looking at mods that are intended to improve performance and make the game run more smoothly, because without the constant performance hiccups, the game feels like it would be a lot less of a headache, and the fact that I've gotten it effectively for free is the only thing keeping me going back to messing with it so far.

I'm sure there's more I could rant about, and like, I know Bethesda is famous for stretching systems to and realistically beyond their breaking points to get a game to run, and that's impressive in its own way, but this is honestly so sad in comparison to what they're most known for in a lot of ways.

I think the biggest sign of the grand “fall of Bethesda” or whatever is the fact that Starfield officially released a full calendar month ago today and I literally have zero idea what it is about or what happens in it. absolutely zero cultural osmosis seems to have happened, which would’ve been unthinkable for a Bethesda RPG like ten years ago

[exilederdrick]

Path of Exile 2 – Day 9: The Trial of Chaos

Platform: PC

Controls: X-Input Controller

Class: Titan

Level: 43

Skills:

Rolling Slam L10 with Overpower and Splinter Boneshatter L10 with Execute, Impact Shockwave, and Magnified Effect

Volcanic Fissure L10 with Fire Infusion, Ignition, and Persistence

Shield Charge L9 with Stomping Ground and Second Wind

Armour Breaker L10 with Martial Tempo, Break Endurance, and Break Posture

Infernal Cry L9 with Premeditation and Corrupting Cry

Perfect Strike L10 with Eternal Flame and Unbreakable

Sunder L10 with Brutality and Fist of War

Overwhelming Presence L10 with Precision and Vitality

Content: Chimeral Wetlands, Jiquani's Machinarium, Jiquani's Sanctum, and the Trial of Chaos

The Trials have been a bit of a hot button issue with the community right now, and some issues have already been addressed. But it's definitely obvious this content still needs some work. Still, I really want to include:

What's Working For Me:

I had a ton of fun tonight! I know many people hate the Trials, but I just had a ball with both. Chaos slammed me hard tonight, and I think I needed almost a dozen runs to beat it. But I kept rolling because, with one very notable exception, I was really enjoying it. Part of it is definitely that I'm still loving this exploration phase. But I do enjoy both the challenges the Trials pose and the strategies around trying to beat them.

What I'm Struggling With:

The Trial of Chaos was definitely hard but doable for me. But I do note that one of the reasons I think it took me over twice as many tries as Trial of the Sekhemas is that it is not very learnable. Sure, we'll eventually have everything solved here. But during this period of discovery, the nature of the randomized bosses makes it very difficult to learn the mechanics.

Some of the Tribulations feel pretty severe too. In particular, I couldn't figure out what to do when I got to Bahlak's arena with Impending Doom. The affect took up his entire arena, and I couldn't seem to figure out how to avoid it. It felt like it bricked my run. Additionally, there were other effects that did the same. The most notable for my build was Unstoppable Monsters. I tried it just to check, and it completely stopped my build from functioning properly. And considering how dangerous other Tribulations can be, I'm worried about trying to run higher tier Ultimatums only to end up with three choices that will make my run unbeatable near the end. At best, I think some of the Tribulations are pretty overtuned.

I can honestly see many Trial of Chaos runs becoming harder than any other pinnacle content.

What Didn't Work:

So I did ran into mostly minor issues tonight. Nothing game breaking or that didn't get resolved by restarting. The most annoying is that you can't send items to your stash with one button on controller in Trials. As usual, I reported or confirmed everything I found. But I want to talk about the first moment in Path of Exile 2 I stopped having fun.

It was Uxmal.

I don't like putting gameplay in here very often, because what's fun or challenging varies from person to person. But this fight was seriously bad. I spent the majority of it bored and frustrated. The only reason I died was I was trying so hard to get the fight over with I made mistake.

I see what you're going for here. You're trying to make a challenging and interesting winged adversary, almost like a Skyrim dragon fight. But the thing that made those fights enjoyable wasn't a never-ending pursuit. And at their best, those fights got dull really quickly.

The way the arena is shaped and the frequency with which Uxmal leaves combat makes the fight slow and tedious. To make matters worse, either by bug or intention, the chilled ground Uxmal created at the start of the fight didn't go away. So a large portion of the arena caused Chill. But even when I could avoid it, repeatedly chasing after Uxmal was just annoying.

I hate to say it, but I honestly think this one should go back to the drawing board.

Again, I honestly really enjoyed the Trial of Chaos. I intend to try and complete every tier of it. Other than a few bugs, it really just was the one sour note that I fortunately only dealt with once.

[falkreathbard]

The Knights Mentor: A Summary

Today's Knightly Order is the Knights Mentor, the militant arm of the Order of Julianos. Enjoy

The Temple of Julianos is one of a few universally accepted religious organizations in Tamriel, and that’s in no small part thanks to the Knights Mentor, a group of holy warriors dedicated to spreading knowledge and preserving the history of Tamriel through it’s two Orders. Like the hemispheres in the brain, these two Orders work in tandem with each other to find, recover, learn, and teach.

Both the Order of the Tome and the Order of the Pen draw from the same pool of prospective members of the Knights Mentor, and those members are drawn from the recommendations of the Priests of Julianos in chapels and temples across Tamriel and sent to Fort Kastav in the Winterhold region of Skyrim. It is here that the young Scribes are given a choice: focus on combat, leadership, and archaeology or focus on knowledge of the arcane, compassion, and teaching?

The Order of the Tome is dedicated to uncovering what was lost to time or malice, delving deep into the bowels of the forgotten corners of Tamriel to hunt for any scraps of knowledge of our ancient past. Oftentimes they aid expeditions led by the various colleges, providing much needed protection in exchange for a copy of whatever is learned from the depths, ensuring that even if the original is lost the knowledge lives on. Their second duty is that of waging a war that has gone on for millenia, a constant struggle against the forces of Hermaeus Mora and the secrets hoarded by his worshippers.

On the opposite side of the coin rests the Order of the Pen, these are more scholarly types that focus instead on sharing the knowledge in the Tome with those who are not fortunate to get an education otherwise. Most Pens are assigned to smaller communities or towns, where they teach the local populace in reading, writing, maths, logic, reasoning, and the sciences. The Pens also act as skilled librarians, and operate in libraries all across Tamriel both public and private.

All Scribes are given the same basic education before they are split into more specialized training for their chosen Order. In order to advance, a Scribe must show proficiency in basic combat skills, athletic ability, reading, writing, logic, reason, maths, the basic sciences, the five schools of magic, alchemy, and enchanting. In addition they must also display conversational fluency in two languages that are not their mother tongue. It is then that they are formally initiated into the Tomes and the Pens for more specialized training.

Novices in the Order of the Tome are assigned a mentor for more personalized training in combat, archaeology, anthropology, combative spellcraft, and the “dead” languages. These lessons are given while travelling to and from retrieval assignments throughout Tamriel. Tomes are also trained in horsemanship, woodcraft, and other survival skills by their mentor as they travel across the continent (and neighboring islands). At some point, All Tomes are returned to the Library at Fort Kastav, where their progress is reviewed, tested, and are rewarded with advancement in the Order. After passing this they are given their first group assignments in aiding the Colleges with expeditions, or going with other squads of Tomes against the forces of Hermaeus Mora.

Students of the Pen are assigned with four other students to a more advanced Scribe for small-group training in the library sciences, literary analysis, good teaching rhetoric, and the importance of good research. This is in addition to more traditional classroom settings taught by Elder Scribes who guide them through the five schools of magic, alchemy, logic, rhetoric, advanced maths, “dead” languages, and the fine arts. After graduation they may choose to stay at Fort Kastav or travel to one of the Temples of Julianos in Tamriel to assist in teaching there before being assigned a town to be the student-teacher under the Scribe there.

Certain assignments are too much for only one branch of the Order to handle, and on these occasions a detachment of both Orders is sent, in addition to members of the Knights of the Lamp. Partnership with the Lamp Knights has been ongoing since the founding of both organizations, and shows no sign of stopping. Regrettably, the same cannot be said for the College of Winterhold, as the Arch-Mage Shalidor infamously fought for higher standards among mages, and only selectively enrolled students to fit his strict standards of class and caste. Attempts to rectify this divide, despite the organizations being so near to one another and sharing similar goals, have only met in failure and occasional bloodshed.

The Knights Mentor are trained in the use of the humble broadsword, but may choose to fight using other means and methods. Knights of the Tome are also trained in the use of the shield, which are colored white with the sigil of Julianos emblazoned on it in glittering emerald green. The swords issued are made from steel, and are inscribed with runes that glow faintly green in the darkness, both Orders also carry a sphere of magelight in a covered lantern that provides a clean source of light without the need for fire around sensitive documents and old tomes.

The robes worn by the Knights Mentor are white with a green sash worn around the waist and over the shoulder. Sturdy leather boots with spurs are standard, and in colder climates or rainy conditions all Knights carry two cloaks in their saddlebags. One made from fur for colder climates, and another from tightly woven wool or oilskins to keep the rain off. When travelling, Knights of the Pen wear light leather armor under their robes, in addition to leather vambraces and greaves. Knights of the Tome wear half-plate under a white tabard emblazoned with the sigil of Julianos surrounding an open book in addition to their shields, they also carry cloaks, and when not prepared for combat they wear a sash with their sigil and rank over the white robes typical to the Knights.

Ranks will be presented in groups of three - With the exception of the ranks of “Knight” for both the Pens and the Tomes - and divided into five categories: Students, Pens, Tomes, Officers, and Leadership.

Students: Junior Scribe, Scribe, Senior Scribe Pens: Knight, Scholar, Lecturer, Mentor

Tomes: Knight, Keeper, Archivist, Archaeologist

Officers: Knight-Sergeant, Senior Archaeologist, Senior Mentor

Leadership: Knight-Master, Master Archivist, Master Archaeologist

[filipfatalattractionrblog]

I think one aspect to add is that the hammer needs to be sufficiently big. This is something I saw discussed in a video today, the speciffic example:

Wizard at level 5 in 5e gets access to two spells - fireball and lightnig bolt - that can easilly kill on sight multiple level-appriopriate enemies or NPCs. Fighter at level 5 can drop two a turn, four with action surge. Why would they ever feel the need to not solve things with combat or even try to do anything cool like trying to use enviroment to their advantage, when killing things is most effective way of solving problems?

This is different from TSR-era D&D or OSR games where by all means you still have the same options of hurting and killing things...but you don't wanna use them, because it presents a risk for yourself. Mausreitter went a step further and made combat absolute pain to run solely to discourage players from wanting to fight (if your mice in Mausreitter get into combat, something went VERY wrong).

Another issue related to big hammer is that even if combat breaks out it's...really hard to actually make an interesting combat if you want to run combat. I noticed that every time I try to run a boss fight in 5e, it goes the same - I set up things that will make the fight interesting - minions, traps, terrain, timed events, timer going down - and the players ignore them to focus fire on the boss. Because that's most optimal thing to do.

Also there is an issue of Suprisingly Small Hammer, where a method that should allow the party to skip combat turns out to be oddly pathetic in comparison. Once had player pull clever trick to force-feed the boss bunch of lift dynamite, which exploded in his stomach...doing on max less than half of his HP in damage. Nowadays I would probably shut up and let it one-shot the boss, but I still managed to salvage this by taking half of boss hp and doing a silly animesque "when the smoke clears, the guy is standing there, bleeding from multiple internal wounds, looks at you and calmly says "Now I'm really pissed off.".

Also another issue is, that skipping combat in a system where you have to prepare a whole encounter, including minis or tokes and maps and strategies, may also feel unsatisfying for the DM. It takes significant skill to know where and how to rewrite the encounter and repurpose it (see Dimension 20, where they know they'll have combat every other episode and it's hard to skip it after so much money went into custom miniatures and terrain, and yet Brennan still had to rewrite on the spot two out of 3 fights in Escape from the Bloodkeep).

I tihnk it takes extra work for the DM to set up an ability for PCs to skip the fight. I did manage it recently with setting up two different big battles, then allowing the PCs to sweet talk and haggle their way out of doing either. It felt satisfying, but I did feel it taks the GM muscles the game doesn't focuses that much on.

And I say all these things as someone who likes 5e and accepts it as a power fantasy type game. That being said, it's not surprising this game has such rich modding community, it's basically Skyrim of pen & paper

Anyway ultimately justifications based on "well that's how it is in the setting" about stuff in any media will ring hollow if the criticism is approaching it not from the point of view of interrogating it through in-setting logic but from the point of view of an actual human being making a conscious decision to make it like that.

Like yeah we can sit and jerk off all day about how killing cultists is justified through in-game logic because they're literally trying to make Hell real, but when viewed with even a modicum of media criticism you can maybe start to wonder why cultists are such a common villain in medieval fantasy gaming.

Similarly, yeah, sure, in-universe orcs may have been created by an evil god and that's why they're predisposed to evil, but given the already racialized portrayal of orcs in the source material they come from plus the game further adding the reading that they're actually tribal savages, it suddenly puts into context some of the Fucked Up stuff that the author of the game said later in his life.

Anyway, none of this is to say that if you're not constantly thinking about this or flagellating yourself while engaging with the game you're somehow a bad human being, but like the stuff in fiction didn't just emerge out of The Void but came to as a result of someone's decision to dedicate it into the writing. Some people just enjoy thinking about this stuff in our free time, like I certainly do, and speaking for myself interrogating media like this rarely affects my ability to enjoy or engage with said media.

[curlythenord]

How It Began

Hey, so this is new, and weird. But I have no one to talk to about this to without annoying them, and this is basically my new and only hobby. And I like it a lot. And most of us are stuck inside anyways so why not?

Skyrim is quite a few years old, so maybe some of you have wisdom to give. Or not, and you could just hear about my faliures/achievements and laugh. Either way, this feels therapeutic in nature, and puts two things I love together. Writing and... well, Skyrim.

So, three or four weeks into quarantine, and I was already pretty out of it. I didn’t have any solid hobbies to pick from and I was waiting on amazon book deliveries. Then, Jenna Marbles posted her video “A Tour of My House In Elder Scrolls Online” and I watched it and I really liked it. She mentioned how much she liked it many times before and something about the fantasy and quests just struck a cord in my bored little heart.

It’s like the attraction of Animal Crossing that a lot of us are having, except it’s with dragons and magic and swords. Both are still very valid.

That afternoon I downloaded Blades on my phone and played for literal hours. Something about swinging a sword and killing trolls and monsters really got to me. I wasn’t a fan of building the town and upgrading the blacksmithy but otherwise I enjoyed it. Then on Easter I kinda browsed through amazon, wondering if I could buy the game right now because of quarantine and all that. We have a ps4 at home, it’s my little brothers. I found a copy of the 2016 beautified version on Amazon, and then he went and found it on the playstation store for way less.

Soon enough I caved to my desires and I bought it. And I was immediately obssessed. I spent like an hour JUST creating my character. I wanted her face paint to be just right and her eye color was so hard to pick because I kept getting getting stuck between this hella striking blue and this really cool dark golden/hazel color. (I decided on golden) I chose Nord after debating about it for awhile, and i’m still not regretting the decision. She has really dark black hair and dope ass war paint on her eyes. I know Breton was probsbly the better choice but the Nord character hasn’t been an issue at all. I do always forget to use her war cry thougj. I think it’s because I can only use it once a day (in-game) so it makes me scared to use it. Even though days are just around 20-30 minutes long without fast travel.

Her name is Toril, which means “thunder”, and I know shes my avatar and everything but like... she’s so cool.

I chose the Warrior stone, because I genuinely just wanted to fuck shit up with a Sword. I always thought I was naturally super bad at console gaming becuase I tried playing COD before and I was terrible. Like really bad. Like propably shot myself more in the foot than I shot anyone else bad. But with Skyrim? I keep getting better each time I play. And my attack strategies are getting so much better.

My usual way to fight is a shield and a one-handed weapon. Two-handed is just too bulky and I like swords and the protection of shields. Also it just drains stamina so fast and I don’t like that. At this point I just carry Two handed weapons incase an opponent is Really hard to kill without it. I also do magic-wielding on left hand (usually restoration spells) and a one handed weapon on right. It’s prefect for combat with slow but really damaging enemies, like dragons or trolls that you can back away from.

Recently, I began dual wielding and it’s honestly so fun. I just hate how much damage I take when I do it against a group of bandits though, so I keep moving away to heal or take potions, but it’s such a fun strategy to use with dragons when they land or just against one opponent.

Anyway, the game is amazing, the characters are fun and weird and yea they’re fake but the storylines are so interesting. I decided to go with the imperial gaurd in the beginning, so I went to Riverwood, and then eventually took main residence at Whiterun. I was a little slow on joining the companions, so I used to just stay at the inn before I lived with them, but a couple days ago I saved up enough to buy the Breezehome. Both a good and bad idea because I still go back to Whiterun a lot, but my quests are now taking me farther and farther away and now I can’t really pop back in whenever I need to store an unneccesary weapon or some dragon bones.

I also hardly let myself fast travel because I really like the game for the exploring aspect. Even though the foxes have given me jumpscares multiple times with their guttural panting.

So yea. After maybe two weeks of playing I’m at level 20, and I’m guessing I’ve spent over 30 hours on the game. I play a little bit each day, but my sessions are usually 2-4 hours long and happen in the afternoon, and if I get on after my brother at 12 am i’ll usually play until 2 before I get too tired. I’ve only got like 13% done though, or at least only 13% of the achievements. My highest acheivement right now is doing alchemy though so I’m not doing great.

I’ve been focusing on the quest with Delphine and Esbern recently, and I’m at the point where I just spoke to the dragon master/teacher of the Greybeards, then spoke to Arngeir about going to Windhelm/Winterhold. I figured I might as well finally visit the college there because I wanted to improve some magicka skills without using my perks. It’s weird though, because as soon as I got back to Whiterun and then headed out to go to Windhelm, I got absolutely raided by dragon attacks.

First, one appeared outside of Whiterun, and me being the pussy I am (after getting my head bit off Multiple times) just shot arrows at it from a distance as the soldiers dealt with it, and then ran over when it was dead to absorb the soul. Then when I was past the farms and the guards tower next to Whiterun, another dragon appeared. I used the Whirlwind sprint to stay next to it’s wing to keep it from biting my damn head off, then used some restoration spells when it was in the air, and dual wielded (when I could attack it) with the Dawnbreaker and this enchanted sword I found at the Sky Haven Temple that deals extra damage when attacking dragons. Absorbed that soul and headed on up to the snowy mountainous area that was on the way to Windhelm.

After dealing with a couple asshole white bears and some whisps, I hear a dragon and absolutely lose it. Why was I suddenly getting bombarded?? I decided to sneak on this one, and got my bow and arrow out. Eventually I got close enough to see not one, but TWO goddamn dragons, before realizing it was Alduin raising one to life (and realized he was salty because I was trying to destroy him by getting the Elder Scroll). Eventually I managed to kill it, still using Whirlwind sprint, healing spells, and dual-wielding. Plus some potions too.

I had to try a couple times for each of these by the way. Even with the second dragon I kept forgetting to save once I was a mildly-annoying-distance-to-repeatedly-walk away from Whiterun, which sucked but it’s whatever. I learned my lesson though and started remembering to save.

I got to Windhelm, which was weird territory because it’s run by Stormcloaks, and had to physically restrain myself from pummeling this drunk guy while he talked down to a Dark Elf and accused her of being a spy because she wasn’t a Nord. Also sometimes guards that aren’t from Whiterun will call me a thief (I unnsuccesfully tried to help out the guy who told me about Esbern’s hideout back in Riften) and it’s a lil annoying because I try really hard to make my character a decently good person. Sucks though because one of the achievements is joining the Thieves Guild and though I don’t necessarily want to do that, I’m gonna eventually unless I create a new character, which I don’t wanna do yet because I like mine too much.

Anyways this is already really long. I’m making another post to talk about my current opinion on choosing between Imperials and the Stormcloaks. If you have any tips, or questions, comment them! Or send me an anon, either is fine. I could literally rave about Skyrim for hours, as you have probably seen. Thanks for reading!

[mazurah]

do you have any headcanons about alteration magic? i feel like due to game balancing limitations, it wasn't as powerful as it actually could have been in-universe. thoughts?

I’ve been sitting on this ask for more than a week trying to figure out how to answer. Yes I have Alteration magic headcanons, but a lot of them aren’t technically mine. 

First off, you’re absolutely right. Alteration is much more powerful in the lore than it is ingame. The Ayleids, who invented Alteration magic, could shapeshift.

There does, however, appear to be evidence that, just as the Psijics on the Isle of Artaeum developed Mysticism long before there was a name for it, the even more obscure Ayleids of southern Cyrodiil had developed what was to be known as the school of Alteration. It is not, after all, much of a stretch when one considers that other Ayleids at the time of Bravil’s conquering and even later were shapeshifters. The community of pre-Bravil could not turn into beasts and monsters, but they could alter their bodies to hide themselves away. 

⁠— Daughter of the Niben

The closest things we’ve ever seen to that kind of magic (not counting things which aren’t actually school-of-magic spells, such as the Wild Hunt, vampire transformations, and werewolves) are spells like oakflesh, which isn’t exactly what I would call shapeshifting. Shapeshifting implies that you’re actually changing your shape, not just changing the consistency of your skin, so I think it’s more likely that the Ayleids did things like make their limbs look like branches to blend in with forests. 

And then there’s that one NPC in Skyrim, the Face Sculptor, that will straight up let you open the character creation menu and change anything about your appearance except your race or sex. (What, no sex change option? Transphobic!) You can’t tell me there’s not Alteration magic involved in that somehow (although I would certainly listen to a case for Restoration.)

There’s also a spell (actually a greater power) that got cut from Skyrim called Polymorph Skeever which lets you turn yourself into a skeever. It was never implemented in the game, but it exists in the code, so I think it’s safe to say that it’s a valid piece of lore. Polymorph spells do exist! There’s even more of them in ESO.

So do I believe that a master Alterationist could potentially turn somebody into a chicken? It’s quite possible. Are we ever gonna be able to turn NPCs into chickens? Not without the Wabbajack. They gotta balance the game somehow.

To be honest, this is a limitation to magic in general, not just Alteration. If I was really a master healer, what’s to prevent me from healing somebody’s mouth closed? Or casting a spell that causes my enemy to have a heart attack? There’s all kinds of things I would love to be able to do with magic that I can’t because of game limitations, like casting a spell to send me to Oblivion so I can go exploring, or conjuring a Dremora or Winged Twilight to ask them about themselves (both of which exist in the lore.) Or using levitation in Skyrim. *sigh*

Back to Alteration though. If you want to know about Alteration in general, the lore book you should be reading is Reality and Other Falsehoods:

It is easy to confuse Illusion and Alteration. Both schools of magic attempt to create what is not there. The difference is in the rules of nature. Illusion is not bound by them, while Alteration is. This may seem to indicate that Alteration is the weaker of the two, but this is not true. Alteration creates a reality that is recognized by everyone. Illusion’s reality is only in the mind of the caster and the target.

To master Alteration, first accept that reality is a falsehood. There is no such thing. Our reality is a perception of greater forces impressed upon us for their amusement. Some say that these forces are the gods, other that they are something beyond the gods. For the wizard, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the appeal couched in a manner that cannot be denied. It must be insistent without being insulting.

To cast Alteration spells is to convince a greater power that it will be easier to change reality as requested than to leave it alone. Do not assume that these forces are sentient. Our best guess is that they are like wind and water. Persistent but not thoughtful. Just like directing the wind or water, diversions are easier than outright resistance. Express the spell as a subtle change and it is more likely to be successful.

⁠— Reality and Other Falsehoods

This is a great start, but it doesn’t help us understand what it would be like to use Alteration on a daily basis, and that’s where headcanon comes in. I headcanon that people have different ways of conceptualizing spells, and this can result in different teaching styles. Sometimes the differences are cultural. But ultimately, it comes down to how good you are at envisioning the changes you want, how much you believe the changes can/should/will happen, and how good you are at willing those changes into existence. How to Disappear Completely by @chameleonspell contains an excellent illustration of what it’s like to try to learn Alteration and navigate the cultural differences between teaching styles as a novice: 

Iriel had studied Alteration. Had, at one point, thought he might specialise in it. It had sounded so impressive, when he first attended lectures at the Crystal Tower: change the world! Bend the physical realm to your will - sorry - your Will! Then he had attended classes, and spent months learning about counter-aetheric force (the academic term for what ordinary people, who didn’t understand these things, called gravity) and formulas to calculate water pressure and wind resistance. Altmeri magical tradition demanded that students first master the theory. You had to learn the rules before you could break them. He might be allowed to actually alter things in a few years, if he studied hard and passed the exams.

Things were different when he transferred to Cyrodiil. There, the Professor of Alteration was a steely-eyed Imperial known to students as The Cliff, due to her threats to throw students off one, if their problems with levitation persisted. Necessity focused the mind, she said. Alteration was all about willpower and belief. She didn’t hold with teaching the physics of it. You are a mage, she would roar. You make your own physics! Your mind will do battle with the Aurbis, and if you are worthy, the Aurbis will bow before you!

She was rumoured to be working on a transmutation spell that would change lesser substances into gold. They said she spent her nights concentrating on a rock on her desk, glaring the resistance out of it, molecule by molecule. When she looked at him, Iriel could believe it. But, struggling to levitate a feather on his own desk, he hadn’t felt that engaging the universe in mental combat was ever going to be his forte. It was so much bigger, and more experienced than he was, so much more self-assured. There were thousands of years of inertia behind its processes, grinding like endless Dwemer machinery. His will, even capitalised, was too weak a spanner to jam into those works. A minor blip in the rhythm, at most, and it’d be crushed as the gears churned on.

He’d found himself returning to the equations he’d been forced to memorise at the Tower. He’d discovered, to his chagrin, that the Sapiarchs had been on to something, at least to his Altmeri-educated mind. If you wanted to change something, it helped to understand the thing you were trying to change. Staring at the feather, he had realised he didn’t need to do battle with the entire Aurbis, he only needed to fight the air immediately around the object he wanted to move, convince it that local relative masses were very slightly different. The Cliff had been right about one thing: it was about belief. And Iriel found it considerably easier to believe things if he could construct a veneer of logical process, however flimsy.

He’d balanced the feather on his finger. It barely weighed anything. Using the standard formula, it couldn’t be constrained by more than a quell of counter-aetheric force. He had repeated the incantation, but instead of trying to command physics as a whole, he’d merely suggested a minor adjustment to the relative densities of feathers and air, just within these few square inches.

The feather had shot upwards and lodged an inch into the plaster of the ceiling. He’d blinked, brushed the dust from his hair, and began recalculating the ratio. An hour later, he’d floated up to retrieve it himself.

⁠— How to Disappear Completely, Chapter 93: force by @chameleonspell ​

(That entire work is amazing and contains so many headcanons and extrapolations of lore I couldn’t possibly begin to summarize them if I tried. You should read it.)

The thing about Alteration, and to a lesser extent, all magic in general, is that to perform it, you must wrestle with the very nature of the universe. Alteration, at its essence, contains what could potentially be understood as the fundamental principle of magic: to perform it, you must impose your Will on the world around you. When you perform it, you change the world. 

This is not without consequences. I headcanon that the greater skill a mage has with Alteration, the more trouble they have with distinguishing what is real and what is not, and with maintaining control over the reality of their personal environment. This is a headcanon I garnered from reading the works of @troloputo2012, and to some extent, @chameleonspell.

The advanced alterationist starts with sensory issues, since they start being able to listen and see the mechanisms of this world (also the plane where spirits and magic roam, that occupies the same place as this Mundus, and being this over saturated with information can be overwhelming), and slowly, they start having trouble attaching to reality and they can’t go back to their normal life as before; many have grounding sensory “mechanisms” to wake up, but many don’t because sometimes nothing works … .

Many experts get tired of constantly wrestling with existing or fail because their will is not strong enough, just give up and vanish, or they get consumed into their own reality and are unable to follow the currents of the world and time … .

To be able to live correctly and master alteration, one must have considerable willpower, or it’ll consume you. You learned to use alteration to weaken reality for you, now you must use it to also reinforce reality (for you start to unconsciously exist in weakened reality you created for yourself) to live.

— Alteration is not as harmless as it seems. by @troloputo2012

So a master of Alteration who fails to have enough Willpower to maintain their own existence might even disappear completely (a concept very similar to the tenuously canonical concept of Zero Sum, wherein a person truly perceives the nature of the universe, sees that they are a figment of the Divine Dream, confronts the concept head on, and fails to assert that they still exist, thus ceasing to exist.) Sure, a master of Alteration can change reality to an amazing degree, but there is a danger; there is a price.

Finally, I have a headcanon (which I’m pretty sure isn’t actually my idea, but I’m not sure where I picked it up) that schools of magic are more like philosophical models for creating spells rather than rigid expressions of natural law. Ultimately, almost any spell could potentially be created using almost any school of magic, but depending on what the spell does, it may not be a very good spell. It might use too much magicka, or it might be insanely hard to cast, or it might take a really long time to conceptualize the spell in that school of magic so nobody bothered trying to make the spell in the first place.

This is an easier idea to apply to Alteration than it is to some other schools like Conjuration (like, what am I gonna do, conjure healthy body parts for a dying person?) but it can go a long way to explaining why some spells change schools between games. For example, there are a few Alteration spells (mostly resistance spells) that get moved to the Restoration school of magic between Morrowind and Oblivion. If you’re looking for an in-universe explanation for this, perhaps spell researchers developed more efficient spells using the philosophy of Restoration, and the magical community had come to accept them as the norm by the time Oblivion began.

So yeah, there’s a lot of overlap between schools. In fact, there are documented arguments between mages about the similarities and differences between schools:

The School of Alteration is a distinct and separate entity from the School of Destruction, and Bero’s argument that they should be merged into one is patently ludicrous. He insists — again, a man who knows nothing about the Schools of Alteration and Destruction, is the one insisting this — that “damage” is part of the changing of reality dealt with by the spells of Alteration. The implication is that Levitation, to list a spell of Alteration, is a close cousin of Shock Bolt, a spell of Destruction. It would make as much sense to say that the School of Alteration, being all about the actuality of change, should absorb the School of Illusion, being all about the appearance of change.

⁠— Response to Bero’s Speech

While I believe that Alteration is an insanely powerful school of magic in the right hands, it’s probably still easier to heal someone using the principles of Restoration than it is to do it using the principles of Alteration.

Feel free to add your own headcanons, I love having discussions like this!

[hunnybadgerv]

Please tell us (me) about your two skyrim characters! Mine is a smith. She's always a smith.

Well, there is Min; she is a thief who is skilled with a dagger and is adept in subtly/illusion magic. Her parents were both Nords and members in good standing of the Thieve’s Guild in Riften before they relocated to Bruma, which is where Min was born. She always showed a proclivity for her parents’ trade and followed closely in their footsteps. Once in Bruma her father began taking jobs with the local Fighter’s Guild as well. Min grew up there, and thankfully most of the place was peopled by other Nords, despite that, there could still be issues. 

She’s capable in physical combat, but is more dependent on her magic than either of her parents. Once she gains her freedom, she heads to Riften seeking to live up to a promise she made years earlier. Right before he left Bruma, she swore to Brynjolf that she would find him, that they would be together again. 

When she got to Riften though she didn’t rush right into the city and throw herself at him. It had been a long time. And she might not have been that memorable. She to be sure that there might still be a chance for them. Only with her bets hedged did she finally make her presence known to him. Even still, she didn’t force him to live up to anything they’d said to one another all those years earlier. She gave him an out; one he did not take. The reality of her life kind of left her a bit of a cynic, who is less trustworthy, thus she didn’t assume that any of those things they whispered to one another in stolen moments were solid proclamations. Though she had prepared herself for his arrival, a part of her did not actually expect to see him that night. 

For Min, she’s a tiny woman, especially given her lineage. Short and slight. Her hair is white and a little on the wild side. Her eyes are violet and haunting. She still wears the cloak that Brynolf gave her the night he came to her rescue. The dagger she carries is one her father used as an offhand weapon. Only after her father passed, did she venture north to find the thief that stole her heart.

* ~ * ~ * ~ *

Laerke’s father was a mercenary of Nordish decent, and her mother was equally capable, but her lineage was a bit muddier–Breton, Redgaurd, Nord. Her mother always told her amazing stories about her ancestors, how they did not wed for money and names like the Imperials, how her people only married someone of prowess and only ever for love. It honed Laerke’s romantic streak.Her father would tell her the stories of his people, her people. These stories inspired her adventurousness.  

Her parents tended to delve deep into ruins and caves and places that others would not dare to wander. And sometimes Laerke would go with them. When they had someone who was apprenticing to one or both of them, they would be tasked with keeping an eye on Laerke, who was trained in combat from the time she could walk. Sometimes there wasn’t anyone to keep an eye on her, so her mother would spell a family amulet to keep her hidden from sight, then Laerke would travel in their wake. 

She loved it. Of course, she knew nothing else. So, it is difficult for her to settle down. She falls into the Companions on a whim. It leads her toward something solid and offers her a family eventually, though it is difficult for her to actually settle down. She struggles with the idea of making a home. At first, most of the homesteads that she ends up purchasing or earning through service are really only merely places more comfortable to sleep, though there are many nights where she just sleeps on the floor. She’s more accustomed to that. 

Though she tries to be a solid individual, she struggles to with being still, being in one place for too long, even if it is with Vilkas or any of the Companions, or the others she counts among her friends. Thankfully, Vilkas doesn’t mind going off on her adventures with her, though he likes it less when she goes off without him, and least when she goes off alone. 

It was Vilkas who helped her through the transitions early on. And it was she who helped free him from the curse that would chain him to the hunting grounds of Hircine. She gave him something he never could have hoped for and he wanted to share the bounty of it with her. 

*Side note:* Laerke was the first character I rolled in Skyrim and I immediately became enamored with the Companions and Vilkas. Then I finally got to Riften and promptly lost my mind at Brynolf referring to my characters as lass. Love this game. I adore the various storylines. Cicero is one of my favorite characters. Though I’ve not played all the DLC yet. 

But I just reloaded it all so I’m going to go ahead and jump back into it this weekend. Possibly, unless I decide to jump into writing hardcore again, which I do not foresee. I’m struggling with focus and behaving like a rational human being.

[zydrateacademy]

First Impressions - Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord

(Do I still have anyone reading my stuff? Been a while! I’m sure there’s plenty of games I could have been doing reviews and impressions on... But frankly Tumblr got a bit boring. Them axing nudity was just the start, after that it just became less interesting to browse. Anyway, I’m still active on the likes of Steam and Discord, so if you want to poke me there... lemme know! Anyway...)

This is most certainly an early access review, and it's possible that half of the things I write here will be rendered moot in the coming months. I am also in the process of ordering some new RAM for my computer so this game will likely perform better in another week or two. With those things in mind, I don't want to waste too much time writing a full article-sized review. Instead, I'll just start listing off things I do and don't like. I love the battles! I mean, it's the major gameplay loop of the whole game so it damn well better be enjoyable. The combat itself is a mixed bag, my swings or shots often don't connect when I think they should but that could be a stuttering issue.

I think the ordering of troops could be done with a smoother UI. I'm not sure how, but there is a hell of a learning curve when you want to start ordering each and every type of unit (between infantry, cavalry, and archers)... Trying to tell them all to do different things before your enemies horse army rides up your anus is a chore and a half. And you will eventually have to get them to do other things. Since you're not going to have a full set of cavalry right out of the gate, I found that forcing everyone to charge would leave my dozens of units of infantry behind while my eight or so horse riders get annihilated. So there's that. I like how the game has immediate mod support. There's already a robust community patch and several things available on the Nexus website that can certainly attribute to some quality of life. Simple things like Mixed Gender Troops, and reputation gain when you take out looters. That mode makes chasing looters down slightly more worth your time rather than just training up unused weapon skills (they're not good for much else pretty quickly). My favorite mod so far might be the one that allows cleave damage, without it all of your weapons only hit one enemy at a time. It's saved my ass more than once.

I love the sieges. The mechanics surrounding them have been hit or miss but when it goes well, it feels GREAT. At one point, I was flanking my nation's army (I didn't attach myself to his main force), protecting them while they built up their siege camp. Then I decided to hit the castle and "wait" for the siege to begin, but at the last second... The main army breaks off to fight some defending force, leaving me with the immediate task of fighting off the castle's beefy militia. I lost massively. I like how you don't lose all of your loot when you 'fail', but you do however lose every single one of your troops. I've had to recover about three times now, which is a tedious chore sometimes. On the flip side of that, I am typically an archery. So I helped a battering ram get through by headshot sniping an entire wall's worth of archers. I've been in a single, somewhat evenly matched siege with both armies in the 400's and it was an incredibly intense endeavor. Knowing that reinforcements are a finite resource makes watching the enemy's bar go down all the more satisfying. This is essentially what the Civil War questline in Skyrim was supposed to be, but just didn't have the engine or mechanics to handle it. I like how I'm not a walking god, even with decent armor. I can cut down large swaths of looters on my own (again, thanks to the "cut through everything" mod) but against anything else I actually have to position properly or else I can watch my health melt from arrows. The AI isn't the smartest, but they're not dumb either. I once flanked behind an enemy force but their backline were actually turning around, and backpedaling with their shields up, making my headshots harder to get even though my superior army was advancing on them. What a great feeling to be victorious against an enemy that actually thinks about things like that. I like how dying isn't an instant game over, at least so far. I did uncheck that option. Instead, I'm just captured and hauled away before the game gives me a chance to escape and run off. I don't like graphics, and kind of wish it was prettier for a 2020 game. The foliage and sun shafts are nice and all but the models look a decade old. I've failed an escort quest because I couldn't tell who was who in the town skirmish because the clothing and facial features aren't usually distinct enough.

While I am somewhat indifferent on the XP and leveling system (though there are mods to 'fix' that as well), I actually don't like the percentages on some of the perks. One of the first weapon perks you can get is increasing your damage by... 4%? That's almost nothing in the early game when you're hitting for 20's. At best a few perks in is only giving you 2-4 points of bonus damage, and I know that because the damage alerts in the corner actually tell you. That's... almost worthless in the grand scheme of things. So I wish some of the perks had more meat to them. Speaking of, yes, the game is buggy. I haven't suffered many crashes but I have had a ton of performance issues, which I alluded to in the beginning. Some of the quests don't function properly, and some of the perks don't work without mods (like being able to use Longbows on horseback). Again, the plague of early access. The good news is, beneath the problems is a functional and incredibly fun game. I don't fully understand what is making me enjoy this so much, but I'll have plenty of time of introspection in the coming months as the devs continue to work on fixing things. I do not regret this purchase at all, and that's coming from someone who has been burned by early access a few too many times.

[6qubed]

The Tale of Bluesummer; or That Time I Accidentally Turned My Morrowind Character Into A God

(yes I named my Breton in Morrowind after Legato Bluesummer from Trigun. it was 2004 and I was a teenager, get off me)

this whole post, which ended up running longer than I expected, is dedicated to @quinzelade, who is the one who asked about it.

I’m gonna warn you up front that attempting to replicate what I did will fundamentally alter the way you play the game, assuming they never released a patch or something after the fact. you’ve been warned

okay, so

somewhere in the game (I forget where, exactly. balmora? I dunno) is a place called Wolverine Hall. in there is a guy who sells alchemy ingredients.

what’s important about this guy is that 1.) he sells the two ingredients you need to make a “Fortify Intelligence” potion (henceforth “F.I. potion” for convenience), and 2.) those ingredients restock every time you initiate a transaction with him. not every day, every dialogue. talk to him, buy ingredients, stop talking, talk to him again, more ingredients to buy

side note: I almost said “ingredience”. fuck this website

now because this isn’t Skyrim, you can basically make potions wherever you’re currently standing as long as you at least have a mortar and pestle (there’s other alchemy gear you can use to make your potions stronger, but you don’t strictly speaking need them. maybe. I think. it’s been a while) so you can just stand right next to this guy brewing F.I. potions, buying ingredients from him when you run low, and selling him excess potions you just made from the ingredients to cover the costs

now here’s where things get... mechanical. Morrowind’s skills are each tied to an attribute like Strength, Intelligence, Endurance, and so on. Alchemy is tied to Intelligence. and because this isn’t Oblivion and they hadn’t thought to curtail this nonsense from the jump, if you make an F.I. potion, drink it, and then make another one, the next F.I. potion will have a greater affect, both in terms of numerical increase and duration. you will be smarter, and for longer, and most important of all, there is no upward limit to this

SO

after boosting my Intelligence to Somewhere Roughly Up in the Billions (henceforth “SRUB”), I tried making potions to boost my other stats. Strength was an obvious first choice, as it not only covers carry weight, but also attack damage and, for whatever reason, chance to hit. I also boosted my Agility, Charisma and Endurance, so now nothing could hit me, I could ace any persuasion attempt, and I had functionally unlimited stamina. thus augmented, my next course of action was to stride out into the wilderness and test my new capabilities.

and that’s exactly what the hell I did. looking for the first wild animal to fight, eventually I run across a guar, I take out my trust daedric katana with a custom Soul Trap enchantment (because this game had katanas for some reason so of course I had one; I named my Breton after an anime character what the fuck do you expect), and I attack the guar. it dies in one hit, it’s soul gets trapped... and now I’m looking at my empty hands instead of my sword. puzzled, I punch the air a few times thinking that will bring my katana back, then I actually go into my inventory and look for it. well sure enough there it is, but I can’t equip it because it’s broken. it’s a little weird that it would be broken, because as a daedric weapon it has like 5000 hp. well, I have a repair hammer on me and Armorer is governed by the Strength attribute, and I have SRUB Strength, so no worries. I repair my katana, find another monster, and attack it. I honestly don’t remember what it was, it could’ve been a skrib, it could’ve been a golden saint, it’s really not important. what is important, is that it died in one hit as well, and my daedric katana with 5000-ish hp broke again. in one hit.

here I will divert from the story to explain another mechanic from the Elder Scrolls that they did away with; breakable equipment. see, this was back when Bethesda still thought that having equipment that got shittier the more you used it was a good idea, a delusion they would carry into TES Oblivion and both Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. the way this worked in the Elder Scrolls games specifically was that every time you took a hit your armor would get damaged, and every time you would land a hit on an opponent with a weapon, the game would inflict a fraction of that damage to your weapon as well. this was one of the appeals of stronger weapons; not only did they do more damage per hit, but they also were able to dish out more hits before needing repairs. steel was stronger than iron, elvish was stronger than steel, daedric was stronger than dwemer, you understand. I didn’t just have a daedric katana for Cool Points, I had it because not only was it a strong weapon, but it could also go a long time between repairs. and if you’ve been paying more attention than I was back then, you may have noticed The Problem.

see, weapon damage is governed by that weapon’s skill, in this case Long Blades. the Long Blades skill is in turn governed by the Strength attribute, and I had SRUB Strength, in a game that maxed out your base skill and attribute growth at 100 each. every time I landed a hit on something I was doing SRUB damage, and a fraction of SRUB damage was also being done to my weapon. since even a fraction of SRUB damage is still way more than anything the developers of the game ever designed the weapons to handle, even the weapons wrought from the very essence of Hell itself were buckling under the weight of the blows I was dealing. furthermore, since repair hammers have about ten uses before they broke (SERIOUSLY WHY DID BETHESDA THINK THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA) it was taking at least one full hammer to repair my katana every time I broke it, which was quickly becoming A Hassle.

at this point I decided “okay, I’ve had my fun, time to bring this silliness to an end” and decided to reload from a save, but here is where I encountered A New Problem: see, Morrowind didn’t have autosaves, no game really did at this point in history, but what it did have was King Fool of Dummy Mountain playing it, for whom the concept of “multiple save files” was an alien and terrifying thing that one just didn’t bother with. there was no easy way to undo the potions’ effects. I couldn’t dispel them, because it was a potion effect and not magic, and the only other option was to wait them out.

so that is what I tried. I found an inn somewhere, possibly Vivec City or maybe some random rathole of a place out in the middle of nowhere, paid whatever the cost was, jumped into bed and tried to sleep the potions effects off, twenty-four hours at a time. one day, then two. then a week, a month, two months. a year. a year and a half spent in a random bed in a random inn, and still the effects persisted. here was Another Problem; the F.I. potions’ duration was also affected by Intelligence, and I had made and consumed several potions with at least a few million seconds duration on them, and at least one that would last SRUB seconds. I could stay in this bed, doing nothing but sleeping one day at a time, for over a week in real-world time, before this potion even reached half of its maximum duration. I was, for all intents and purposes, Stuck Like This.

so now began the search for workarounds. my first thought was the Unarmed skill; if I just didn’t use a weapon, it wouldn’t break, right? the problem here was that Unarmed was governed by your Speed skill. yes, you had both a Speed and an Agility attribute, and they did different things. but Speed also affected how fast your character could move around in the game world, and giving my character SRUB Speed proved disastrous; the game, you see, was only designed to handle a maximum Speed of 100, maybe more if you boosted it with temporary effects. at least once in a dungeon I ran so fast that I clipped through the walls and ended up floating in an infinite plane of water that apparently served as the water at the lower points of the level. I was not, mercifully, Stuck Like This, because while I was still King Fool of Dummy Mountain I was at least smart enough not to repeat all of my past mistakes, and had thought to save my game before trying this nonsense.

so Unarmed was out. that meant if I couldn’t count on one unbreakable weapon, I’d have to make so with numerous single-use ones. Archery was no good, because the bows were breakable, and thrown weapons were finicky at best, and more importantly I couldn’t get them back if I used them up. I then hit upon the idea of daggers, and set about traveling over Morrowind, finding every merchant I could that sold weapons and buying up every silver dagger or enchanted dagger of cheap material I could find. this was important, because I wanted a way to fight ghosts and other immaterial enemies, who could only be hit by silver or enchanted weapons. or daedric, but for reasons I covered previously those were no use to me. I then developed a fighting style wherein I became adept at fast-equipping weapons mid-combat, allowing me to stab one enemy, then quickly pull out another dagger and use that to kill the next. this also led to one particularly memorable encounter where in my explorations I stumbled across a shrine adorned with six skulls, each with an enchanted dagger stuck in them, and without hesitation I grabbed all six, only to turn around and see a group of six very pissed off ancestor ghosts, whom were no doubt bound to those skulls by the daggers I had just removed. as luck would have it, however, I had just the right amount of daggers to handle this fight. convenient, that

well that covered melee combat, but still left the issue of Magic. being a magic user was less of a tricky issue, since with SRUB Intelligence and SRUB Wisdom came functionally unlimited Mana, so I could cast any spell I wanted without fear of miscasting, because giving spells a chance to fail a casting depending on your skill with that spell’s magical school was another one of those brilliant ideas Bethesda had on the same day they came up with breakable equipment.

since money was no longer an issue, I visited a Mages Guild and crafted a few custom spells for myself. nothing complicated, just a ranged damage spell of some kind with maximum damage over maximum duration with maximum area of effect (and Paralyze and Soul Trap, because why not) and one or two spells that boosted my Speed and Athletics sklll so that even though I couldn’t boost it via Alchemy without disaster, I could still run around fairly quickly, which was handy because fast-travel hadn’t been invented yet, and I was now using my Mark and Recall spells solely to visit the secret scamp merchant that had 5000 gold for buying things, as it was now the only merchant in the game that could handle the monetary value of the goods I had to sell, and even that required a fair bit of back-and-forth juggling with the items that I had sold it previously, especially excess potions

it was here that I finally found A Weakness in my character; my health points. I had up until now coasted by on my ability to dodge any attack and one-shot any opponent; at this point I wasn’t even bothering with wearing a full set of armor or even (being a puerile thing at heart) most clothes. I had some greaves, a mismatched arrangement of gauntlets and pauldrons, and that was it.

but that changed the first time I encountered an enemy capable of Reflecting my own magic back at me. see, I thought that giving myself SRUB Endurance would confer SRUB HP when I first took that potion, but it never happened. and since maximum HP gained through leveling up is calculated from base Endurance, SRUB HP simply wasn’t in the cards. well that was easy enough to rectify, first by going back to the Mages Guild and crafting a spell that both boosted maximum HP and healed the maximum amount, both for maximum duration, as well as crafting a magic ring that could send out some (comparatively) weak bolts of damage, and recharge itself over time

at the end of it, even with all the searching for workarounds to my... condition, the actual game became fairly easy. the “final bosses” of the DLCs, daedric princes and even deity figures proved almost comically nonthreatening, because at the end of it they were all still playing by rules to which I was no longer bound. really the only thing keeping me from beating the game was the fact that my XBox and all my games for it got stolen.

so I guess the moral of this story, if there is one to be had, is when you’re planning to do something stupid, save first or prepare for it being irreversible

that, and don’t bring anything to Job Corps that you wouldn’t mind getting stolen

[shellheadtmarc]

| BASIC INFO

During the First Era (1E), the social landscape of Tamriel was a different place.  Dragons dominated the Nords of Skyrim, spurring the creation of the Tongues who learned to battle them in their own language, the Thu’um.  The Nords were at war with literally everyone, being transplants from the frozen-over continent of Atmora.�� Races such as the Dunmer and Imperials didn’t quite exist just yet, in their stead and leading to them the Chimer and Nedes.  And there were more groups of elves, the most mysterious among them the technologically advanced and atheistic Dwemer.

They made their home in Dwemereth - later called Resdayn and then Morrowind - and spread outward from there, as far as Skyrim and Hammerfell.  While most elven races are drawn to magic and given to looking to some higher power - be it the Aedra, Daedra, an avatar (such as the Silvenar), or to the later Tribunal, the Dwemer made use of magic, of course, but spurned the so-called gods, convinced they were nothing but ascended mortal beings themselves, and that anyone, with the right combination of things, could also become a god.

In fact, that was the Dwemer endgame.  To wake, as they said, from the dream of living, to end the dream, and to become part of a giant brass god, with the intention of using the earth bones - literally - to do that.  Chief among attempting this was Kagrenac, the Chief Tonal Architect, who possessed tools with which were intended to manipulate the Heart of Lorkhan.  Whether he succeeded or not is up for debate, but one thing is certain:  Every Dwemer on Nirn, without warning, disappeared.

Some say Azura, angry with them, spirited them away to a secret place in Oblivion, to sit and rot for eternity, never to be a part of Nirn again.  Some say Kagrenac succeeded, and they all joined as one with their brass god, achieving their goal.  There are as many theories as to what happened to them as there are questions, and no one particularly has weight over another.

What is known is that the Dwemer were a race of squabblers who failed to agree on much of anything but the waking from the dreaming.  A decades long war broke out over the rare mineral Aetherium, which possessed incredible magical properties.  Displeased with the First Council between the Dwemer and the Chimer, the Rourken Clan left Resdayn to settle elsewhere.  Legend states that Hammerfell - Volenfell in Dwemeris - was founded when the leader of the Rourken Clan threw his hammer Volendrung, and built the Dwemer city where it landed.

Not everyone was keen on waking from the dream of mortal life, however.  There were those that opposed what Kagrenac was attempting to do, and sought to stop the tools from being used on the Heart.

Tnathas is the son of a former Chief Tonal Architect, and a talented one in his own right, outshining his father in nearly every way, yet entirely too eccentric to be the next in line gunning for Kagenac’s job.  Unlike most Dwemer, who were incredibly secretive and secluded from the rest of Tamriel, he’d had itchy feet and a rebellious streak in his youth (that he never truly outgrew), at first sneaking his way to the surface to the outside world, and then brazenly flaunting it, disappearing for weeks from any Dwemer city, instead spending his time with the Nedes and Nords and Aldmer and Chimer and all the other hodgepodge of peoples that lived on the surface.  While creation was his passion, and he excelled at it, sometimes an elf has to do more than sit in a forge all day.

However, once war broke out between the elves and Nords of Skyrim, he found himself in a bad way, injured in a battle he wasn’t even supposed to be present for and destined to die a slow, agonizing death, until chance brought him to a shard of Aetherium, and skill and innate genius formed that shard into something that kept his heart beating and him steady on his feet.  It’s here he finds his It - that life-changing thing that shifts his focus from self-absorbed creation and hedonism to something more altruistic (and uncharacteristic of a Dwemer) and decides that if no one else is going to call Kagrenac out and stop him from the insanity of the brass god, it’ll have to be him.

So - as the supposition that the Dwemer had learned to open pocket planes of Oblivion is a correct one - he installs himself a lab in one, shuts himself in, and gets to work.

When he exits again, it’s the 4E, the city under the Velothi Mountains on the eastern border of Skyrim has fallen to ruins, and there’s nothing to be heard but the chug of sick, aged machinery and steam hissing from punctured and degraded pipes.  All the Dwemer on Nirn, not long after he has his epiphany, vanish.  And there isn’t a single clue as to how or where.

| APPEARANCE & CHARACTERISTICS

Tnathas is of average height for a Dwemeri:  Dwarf is a misnomer, as Dwemer were of average height, comparable to the modern Dunmer, Breton, or Imperial.  Dwemer itself is a Aldmeri word, translating to either “Deep Elf” or “Deep Folk”.  The Dwemer, in truth, referred to themselves as the demeed or as a duuma.  While shorter than Nords, Orcs, and Altmer, he’s by no means small.  They are, for all practical purposes, of the same strain of mer (literally “folk”) as the Chimer/Dunmer, and it’s speculated that they might actually be branches of the same group of elves.  Mention that at your own peril.

Elves, obviously, possess physical differences from the races of men, and Tnathas is no exception.  He’s a physical mishmash of everything you’d expect from any type of elf, from the pointy ears to eyes that echo the Ashlanders with their black sclera (though his irises are golden - something of a common Dwemer eye color).  They are also longer lived than the races of men, though for Tnathas, time has passed incredibly differently, from the time he spent in his pocket plane of Oblivion.  He’s still on the uphill climb to middle aged for a Dwemer, though he’s closer to the crest of that hill than he probably wants to admit.  

Unlike most Dwemer, however, he’s not overly fond of billowy robes and elaborate hairstyles and facial hair.  It’s a habit from all the time he’d spent playing adventurer among the other races of the 1E.  He keeps his hair short, his beard short - sporting only three golden beads hanging from braids - and as his flavor of being a tonal architect favors a more hands-on approach, and he’s never, in any part of his life, been a rare figure in a forge - it serves a practical purpose, as well.

In truth, he looks a lot like a blend of Altmer and Bosmer characteristics, minus the height and the antlers, and it’s incredibly easy to convince yourself he’s either an exceptionally short Altmer, or an exceptionally tall Bosmer - and one that doesn’t follow the Green Pact, at that.  He doesn’t necessarily volunteer the fact that he’s a Dwemer, as a little poking around once coming topside has shown him that doing that is an incredibly bad idea.  

The most notable feature, however, is the inset of some strange, glowing blue disk in a housing of the tell-tale golden Dwemer metal that sits in this chest.  It itself is made of Aetherium, an incredibly rare mineral found sporadically in the deepest reaches of Dwemer ruins - most easily in Blackreach - also known as Fal’Zhardum Din (literally “blackest kingdom reaches”), an underground hub connecting several Dwemer cities.  It’s magical in nature, incredibly hard to work with, incredibly volatile, and it’s part of what’s keeping him alive, thanks to an injury received during the war with the Nords in Skyrim during the 1E.

As a Dwemer, he also possesses a trait called The Calling.  Practically useless now except as a method of interfacing with the animunculi that still toil in the ruins of Dwemer cities, it is something of a psychic hivemind or link all Dwemer can tap in to, something of background white noise in the mind unless one focuses in.  Useful, for a race as secretive as they were, and good for use in a loud forge, but now?  When you’re the only Dwemer left standing, it’s just another reminder that your people are gone, you failed to perhaps stop Kagrenac, and you are, for all practical purposes, the only Dwemer left - possibly in any plane of existence.

| SKILLS

Blacksmith:  As stated before, Tnathas is a gifted blacksmith, preferring to do his own work in the forge rather than leave it to apprentices, and also with using his own two hands to see his designs from drafts to finished products.  This has, since coming topside and to Nirn once more, been an incredibly useful talent to have, as it means he can find work when he needs to that isn’t of the stabby variety.

Mage:  Like most tonal architects, he’s skilled in some forms of magic, such as the schools of destruction and conjuration, as well as the use of musical tones to control machinery.  Mostly used for engineering and assistance with the machinery the Dwemer were famous for, he can use it for combat in a pinch if pressed, though he prefers the bow and light, one-handed weapons.

Aminunculi:  As a Dwemer, he’s probably the one person left walking Nirn that won’t be attacked in a Dwemer ruin - at least by the constructs left behind.  Someone wishing to explore those ruins (though it had better be a good reason, and certainly better than money, if they expect him to take them into the ruins) couldn’t ask for a better person to watch their back, because with Tnathas, it’s probably safer than walking through Whiterun.  He can also repair and reconstruct constructs, as well, and has a modified construction spider that accompanies him nearly everywhere.

| QUIRKS

It should be stated outright that Tnathas is an atypical example of a Dwemer and should be seen as an outlier.  He’s talkative, he’s loud, he’s brazen, he’s arrogant - but not in the ways one expects an elf to be arrogant.  He’s social and has no issue mingling in and out of crowds of different people from all over.  In short, he’s a bit of an oddball when held up against the rest of the Dwemer, who were secretive and closely guarded every secret they had.  Where they were somewhat amoral, he has a moral compass that drives him, and he will, as best as he can judge, try to do the right thing.

He ends up in jail a time or two because of this, and because he can’t keep his nose out of things.

He’s something of a dry-witted jokester and a straight-forward plainspeaker all at once, which is evidence of his mingling Dwemer socialization and being immersed in cultures other than his own for long periods of time.

He tends to refer to places by their old names, before he gets a handle on the new ones, because those are the ones he knows.

Markarth was a bit of a nasty shock the first time he stepped foot inside.  He’s used to it now, but he can remember when it was still a Dwemer city that would have never allowed the hodgepodge of people inside that live there now.

He can navigate through Fal’Zhardum Din blindfolded even in its current state of disrepair.  No he has no idea how that dragon got in there, don’t bother asking.

His ultimate goal when discovering the Dwemer are gone is to find out why and where.  Eventually he’ll get sucked into other causes to champion or oppose, but at the onset, his biggest driving force is to track down every scrap of information from the 1E that he can.

He has no permanent set lodgings, at least not for a while.  Instead he moves from place to place while he hunts down information that’s still extant on what happened before the Dwemer disappeared.

He is available as a companion for a dovahkiin!  Probably not a good one, he’s a smartass, and he’s kind of eh on most factions.  And he’s a loudmouth and shouldn’t, under any circumstances, be taken to Windhelm.  And he can’t be romanced by slapping on an amulet of Mara, you gotta actually work for it.  But he’s a companion nonetheless.

| FACTIONS

The only real faction or group in Skyrim he’ll be interested in becoming a member of himself is the Dawnguard.  Vampires are always a menace, and destructive, and while a cure would be preferable, if it’s vampires or the people of Tamriel, the people of Tamriel win out every time.  He’s not much of a team player, even now, but he can make an exception for Isran and his little group in Fort Dawnguard.

Factions he’s fairly neutral to cool on are the Thieves Guild and the Companions.  He has no real strong opinion the Companions, other than it looks like a whole lot of muscle, not a lot of brains, but you really can’t expect more than that from a fighters guild, really.  The Thieves Guild...Well.  It’s right there in the name.

The College at Winterhold does have a nice library.  He’ll give them that.  He also stans Urag gro-Shub.

And he’s not a fan of the Dark Brotherhood at all.  Or the Morag Tong.

As for the civil war, he has no horse in that race, and won’t get involved unless he has to.

And it goes without saying in general once he knows all about the Aldmeri Dominion, they are free at any point in time to kiss his supposed to be extinct ass.

[ryotaiku]

A defense of Skyrim in the modern day

On November 11, 2011 (11/11/11), The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim released to mass critical acclaim. It won several awards, appeared on a ton of GOTY lists, and is still played to this day. I personally bought it in 2012, thought it was okay, then set it aside for other games. It wasn’t until 2014 that I fell in love with it.

But over the years, opinions of Skyrim seem to have gotten a lot worse.

Some people are put off by the bugs, others say it hasn’t aged well, but there are a few recurring opinions that I’ve never really agreed with. Or at the very least, don’t mind too much. Here are those opinions:

Skyrim has less/no choice

This first argument is different from the rest because it’s not just subjective; it’s just straight-up false. Regarding choice, he amount of choices you have in Skyrim are no more linear than the ones in Morrowind and Oblivion, and it makes me think the people who bash Skyrim are just nostalgic. But if the argument is that there are no choices at all, or that there aren’t enough compared to Morrowind & Oblivion, here are some of Skyrim’s choices:

Join the Imperials or the Stormcloaks

Join or destroy the Dark Brotherhood

Join the Dawnguard or Castle Volkihar

Restore or defile the Star of Azura

Kill Saadia’s bounty hunters or turn her in

Kill or spare Barbas for Clavicus Vile

Multiple dialogue options that require speech checks

And this isn’t even an exhaustive list. There are several choices in Skyrim that either change the reward you get, or affect the game world in some way. They take some time to get to, since you’re only directed towards them at certain levels, but they still exist in the game.

Skyrim is not an RPG

On the other hand, if you just don’t like the lack of RPG elements, and insist that Skyrim isn’t an RPG...

...what the fuck are you talking about?

Skyrim is full of RPG elements. Ignoring the decision-making aspects, and focusing entirely on the technical, here’s a list of things that I consider are pretty significant to what makes something an RPG:

Multiple stats & skill levels, and equipment that changes those stats

Endless variety in character builds with varying weapons, spells, & armor

Total freedom in what quests you do or don’t do

Takes place in a setting rich with lore, and has little details to reflect it

Persistent world, with every NPC (except enemies) serving a purpose

Unique NPCs that die never come back, they stay dead

Marriage options and various home options, letting you actually role-play

In what way is Skyrim not an RPG? I cannot, for the life of me, wrap my head around this argument. There are arguably games with deeper mechanics, but I don’t think the complexity of one RPG should negate the value of another. It’s basically gatekeeping.

Skyrim’s combat is too simplistic

A lot of people complain that Skyrim’s combat is just button mashing, and that there’s no thought to it. Just click and hope your damage is better than your enemy’s. But this one makes me wonder if people ever played any of the games before Skyrim. Because those are just as spamfest. In truth, arguably excluding Oblivion, Elder Scrolls games have never had good combat. Before Oblivion they were just dice rolls to determine hits or misses. Sure, there’s more going on under the hood in those games, but regarding player input it’s boring.

There’s no urgency to the story

This is more of a lore argument. I think Skyrim’s writing is fine for the most part, and it’s fine if you don’t like it, but this one got to me: The world is ending, Alduin is going to consume all that exists, and the hero needs to stop him. But nothing is really hurrying you to do this. For something called a world eater, Alduin takes his sweet time with eating the world. This complaint is certainly valid, and I always chocked it up to ludo-narrative dissonance. But then I remembered this quote that appears in the opening to Morrowind:

“Each event is preceded by a prophecy. But without the hero, there is no event.” -Zurin Aretus | the Underking

Alduin eating the world was prophecised. The Oblivion crisis was prophecised. Dagoth Ur was prophecised. But they never actually happen until the player initiates it. I think what this quote means is significant events don’t happen unless the hero is defeated in trying to prevent it. The story doesn’t progress until you’re there to progress it. Significant events don’t happen unless significant people initiate them.

And honestly, that’s why I still love Skyrim. Because no matter how long you spend away from a game, you can always come back to Skyrim and immediately remember where you are. Everything you’ve done will still be there. And even after playing RPGs with deeper mechanics, better-written stories, and sometimes just better gameplay, I still consider Skyrim to be a great game. And if you haven’t played it yet, I think you should; just to form an opinion of your own.

And if something feels off, you can always mod the game to fix whatever issue you may have. There’s a mod to do basically anything if you search hard enough.

[a-shrieking-cloud-of-bats]

okay so long breakdown of my experience with Morrowind as a starter I first tried to play the game last year, fumbled it, repeated that a few times, before dropping it for a while and eventually coming back to it the past few days and running through it! Ran a Nord, Heavy Armor, Warrior, used almost no non scroll magic, notably used them to deal with locks, used divine intervention once during that one Baar Dau bit in the main story, probably a handful of other scroll usages for random junk. I also didn’t do the expacs and I haven’t played Oblivion in a while so I’m trying to avoid in depth comparisons to it. I’ll start off by saying I did enjoy it overall, and while I don’t think it stole my Favorite TES Award,  it definitely left a mark, and I think my favorite bit of it was the main quest, the tone was just something I liked more then the other two TES games and all in all the whole mysterious diseases angle felt a bit more urgent then more nebulous threats like demons and dragons. Additionally, the plot conceptually I think is just a lot more fun to think about rather then “x is attacking!”, and I think the things like ash creature ambushes and ominous dreams helped that feeling a lot. All in all I feel it was a bit better handled to boot, and I particularly liked the whole “your cover story for being in the blades is that you’re an adventurer because they’re all over the place, you’d blend in, and you’re gonna need to be fighting anyway so you might as well develop that skillset”, since it allowed for explicit breaks in the main quest line where he’d tell you to go do other stuff for a while and “keep your cover story up to date” while he did research or whatever. Added to the settling, added to the plot, added a reason to go faff around in a dungeon and maybe find something cool. Maybe. We’ll get to that.

But the cover story thing is super appreciated because it’s an issue I frequently ran into in other games where it just never really felt like you had a stopping point in the main quest line, if you were playing as if you were legitimately concerned with the status of the main quest. Like, with Skyrim you start out. . . -escape from Helgen -go down to Riverwood with whoever -they tell you Riverwood’s in potential danger so you go up and talk to the jarl -he tells you to help with his investigations of the dragons (if you’re playing a bit more apathetic of a character this could potentially be a time to step out but let’s assume a sort’ve “lawful good” here) - you go down to bleak falls barrow, come back - a dragon attacks the tower, you go investigate and fight it - End Scene; and even then I think it wouldn’t be a stretch to feel like you had to answer the summons, and that goes through a very long road trip, a dungeon, and a dragon fight before you get to a solid “I need to do things, go outside and play” style stopping point. and after all that you’re like.... an hour or two into the game? It’s not absurd but it’s quite a bit compared to silt stridering over to Balmora and getting told to go have fun, and it’s not a game breaking thing, obviously the player doesn’t absolutely have to be told to stop doing main quest stuff, but it was a nice touch that I liked. At any rate I liked the main quest, but I think the thing I was most impressed with was the travel. I went into Morrowind thinking I was going to hate wandering around 24/7 and paying fees and so on and so forth but actually it felt pretty great after a while! I came out of Morrowind preferring the “carriage” system rather then the fast travel system, just because getting more mobility options and strength in that category was interesting to me. Given that I was playing the least mobile “class” in the game; heavy armor weighs a lot which slows your ground speed (I think) and weakens your jumping, with no magic and no knowledge of how to get propylon indices working, I think that’s pretty glowing praise. I also liked the way enchanted gear worked in Morrowind, where there are usable artifacts and passive artifacts, passive artifacts just give you the boost, and usable artifacts are purposely triggered to get an effect and slowly recharge over time, which is a game changer. I know I don’t really use enchanted weapons in Skyrim because it’s not that big a boost and juggling soul gems and soul traps is a pain in the butt, but if they recharged over time I might be more inclined. Again, a nice little thing the game does differently. The graphics were wildly better then I expected, and I think the game is an excellent example of restrictions creating a unique and good looking style in some cases. The polygonal models really add a lot to the fairly eerie main quest backdrop and pretty hostile game world overall, and ultimately the game just sort’ve creates its’ own aesthetic and it’s super good despite being very obviously dated. The entire inside the ghost fence part of the end game was spooky as hell and felt very climactic despite the landscape looking like something that came out of 3D Studio Max circa 1990. And on a side note, Diyavath Fir’s tower and the Corprusarium were a really cool dungeon concept and I’m very surprised the whole “sequential treasure chests with keys in them that eventually lead to a prize” thing hasn’t been done again since IIRC. With all the praise out of the way, let’s get to stuff I was more neutral on or outright disliked (there’s surprisingly little of the latter, by the way). To start off, I felt gear progression felt super weird. I started out by buying a full set of steel armor and an iron long sword and I didn’t get an upgrade until like, halfway through my playtime, so like, two days total, and my long sword went un-upgraded even longer. After a while I found a silver long sword and about an hour after that I found a daedric katana and suddenly the game was basically over past that point because I was 2 shotting everything that wasn’t a higher end ash creature or daedra. It felt very spotty, it wasn’t a game changer or anything, and to be fair once the armor upgrades started going, that progression didn’t feel too bad either (though my shield did get upgraded from steel to daedric). Not a huge deal, but it was a thing. The end game quest line where you’re re-uniting the tribes and houses is a huge chore and also holds the only two escort missions in the game which I don’t think is a co-incidence. I liked the house quests more initially since they were more tightly packed in and had fast travel options around. . . buuuut they quickly became a gold count check. Having to get confirmation from councilors that, by their own mention, wouldn’t be necessary, was also obnoxious, though I didn’t mind that as much, as the whole declaring a war leader thing is a big deal and I can believe that from a plot standpoint. Still didn’t like it. I am aware I could’ve skipped all this with reputation, and that’s fair, but I still think as a quest line it’s a bit much; though I dunno how I’d fix it without banging up the plot significantly, to be fair. All the side quests I did were pretty bland. Lotta “go here, clear this dungeon, come back get x gold”, some “go here, fetch y guy, bring him back, get z gold”. Sometimes you didn’t even get rewarded, though the reputation system makes up for that. I ended up stopping about halfway into House Redoran because the quests were, by and large, just dungeon clear quests and I was vastly more interested in the main quest. It’s something I might take more interest in on a second play through. You can end up trivializing combat very quickly, which was probably a part of why I didn’t end up liking the end game so much. Part of that’s my fault; athletics and acrobatics were minor skills, it basically put me on a timer, and some people like the “I’m level 20 and I can crush anything in the game like a walnut” thing, which is fair. I did end up finishing it at about level 23, and I’ve heard scaling stops at 20, so that’s about right to be fair. Though I’ve also heard Dagoth Ur scales up to 35? It sure didn’t feel like it, and overall it kind’ve made the whole lead up into Dagoth’s big moment a bit of an anticlimax, I hit him like six times for the fight and I got most of the heart fiddling done before he brought me to half. A big part of why I even almost died was because I didn’t realize I had to run back over the bridge. Though that all might be a side effect of running a heavy armor warrior, IIRC they’re pretty easy, but I also did surprisingly little side stuff. It just sorta feels like if you do anything other then the main quest you’ll trivialize the final stages of it, and if you do the main quest you trivialize the extra stuff? It’s a bit of an odd problem to solve and it seems like they’ve still not gotten it quite right, to be fair. I’m trying to think of stuff I outright hated and really all I can think of is the fact that NPCs stand in “one NPC wide” hallways and doorways like it’s their job. A not insignificant part of why I gave up on Redoran is because getting through under-skar was hell because of all the guards just shuffling around on rope bridges and staring at me anytime I got anywhere near them while they clogged up the road. But yeah, overall had a good time and I probably played the least complex character type, so that’s definitely a good sign. I look forward to playing it again and playing with magic more; already thinking on an acrobat like, athletics/acrobatics/whatever magic school does jump/move speed boosts character and getting a bit more into the setting with it, eventually. I definitely get why people love the game so much and while I don’t think I hooked into it quite as hard I admit I haven’t played something quite like it before, between the aesthetics and mechanics either, and admittedly most of my complaints were half complaints, so that’s definitely not a bad track record. Will definitely play again at some point.

[whatsthecraicwithvideogames]

Fallout 4 is not a bad game. Just a bad Fallout game.

We are beginning to inch ever closer to my absolute favourite time of year. The time where all the top game developers come out for a weekend of huge reveals, tech demos, and a special brand of cringe that could only be found in one place. It is of course, E3! The New York Fashion Week for gamers, the best in the business parading around their newest creations for the eagerly awaiting fans. So, as we are on the approach, what better time to use E3 as a backdrop to my discussion for today?

Three years ago, in the early hours of the morning on June 15th, Bethesda had their first E3 showcase; and boy was it something. Due to the time difference, I was cooped up in my bed with my laptop at 2:30am, fervently awaiting Bethesda Game Studio’s director Todd Howard to grace us with his presence and allow us to view the first glimpse of one of the most anticipated games at the time. Fallout 4. I still get chills whenever I think about it. The tentative excitement as we were finally getting our first taste of the sweet, sweet Fallout 4 nectar, the sound of hundreds and thousands of fanboys simultaneously wetting themselves at the prospect of having their very own, real life Pip-Boy, and of course, the revelation that the game would be coming out that very same year, with only five months to wait! If nothing else, Bethesda are the masters of elevating their own hype (evident in the recent 24 hour livestream they recently hosted, featuring barely any activity, purely serving to manufacture mass hysteria leading up to the announcement of their new game: Fallout 76). However, perhaps they may not always be able to deliver on what the people want. Up until a few days ago, I adored Fallout 4. I’ll admit it was the first Fallout game I had ever completed, so I was seeing it through fresh eyes, with nothing to compare it to. Recently, that has changed. I have finally finished my playthrough of Fallout 3, and now I finally see what the people were talking about. Fallout 4, is not a good Fallout game.

The main thing that made Fallout 3 so unique in contrast to any other game I have ever played, is the ability to complete missions in such a wide variety of different ways. Personally, I like to put a lot of ability points into speech; I generally prefer to talk my way out of situations rather than punch my problems directly in the face. That’s partially due to my belief that choosing the peaceful path often garners the most interesting results, but really I’m just so intensely bad at video games that even attempting to shoot my way through a quest would almost certainly end HORRIBLY. That option isn't really available to me a whole lot in Fallout 4. Quests are largely quite linear, with a lot of them simply being ‘go to this place kill some people lift the thing bring it back level up repeat’. I'll give you a prime example of something that I did during my Fallout 3 play through that would never happen in 4. I met Three Dog after making my way to the Galaxy News Radio station, where I was looking for information about my father’s whereabouts. Three Dog initially wanted to restrict the info that he had until I contributed to ‘the Good Fight’ in some way (I believe he sends you to retrieve a radio dish for him). However, I was able to pass a tricky speech skill check, and I was able to get the facts that I needed and subsequently bypassing an entire mission. How many other modern games offer such expansive choice in the way you can play your game? In Fallout 4, charisma is used primarily as a way to get an extra 100 or so caps. It completely loses a huge part of what makes Fallout so special. There is little opportunity to roleplay a character effectively, as there are shockingly few ways to create variance between playthroughs, other than the configuration of perks you choose for you character, and even they don’t alter the gameplay enough to truly make a big enough impact. The lack of nonlinearity is not the only nail in the RPG coffin, however.

One of the most prevalent criticism to be found about Fallout 4 is the massive change to the dialogue system. Before, you had all of your options clearly laid out before you, with multiple attitudes and tones you could take throughout a conversation in order to really make you feel like you were really moulding the personality of your character. Now, you’re restricted to four desperately vague options in a dialogue tree, where it’s really anyone’s guess what is going to come out of your characters mouth. Not really prime conditions for some quality roleplaying. For example, for a lot of the conversations, there is a ‘sarcastic’ option. As if the ambiguous description wasn’t bad enough, choosing this option can often result in your character aggravating whoever you’re talking to with your unnecessary snarkiness, to the point that you can permanently alienate them, which can prove an issue when trying to complete quests a certain way. The decision to implement a dialogue tree is one that truly baffles me, as it is the most obvious difference of this game compared to the last (other than voice acting), and it is a completely unnecessary change that Bethesda must have known would receive backlash. It represents the core problem that the game faces. The core RPG elements of Fallout have been stripped down until they are barely there-which has likely been done so that they could focus more on improving the infamously janky gunplay from Fallout 3. Was having fun and usable combat mechanics AND good RPG elements not an option? Were Bethesda too busy trying to get Skyrim to work on every console ever created and they just forgot to add in the RPG part? The more that I think about it, the more logical that suggestion seems…

The karma system in Fallout 3 was a pretty basic mechanic, where you got good karma for doing good deeds, and bad karma for bad deeds. In turn, the state of your karma affects some of your interactions with the people in the Wasteland. For example, I had neutral karma for the majority of the game, which in turn meant that I had too low karma to acquire Fawkes as a companion, and also too high karma to have Jericho as my companion. It wasn’t the most complicated system, but it added another layer of role playing to the game and made you feel like your actions had consequences. If you had done bad things, you really felt like you were being judged for them by the people you met. Fallout 4 did away with this whole system, leaving instead in its place a significantly downgraded structure where the companion you had with you judged you on small actions that you did. It wasn’t very deep and it had no wide reaching consequences. Admittedly it’s not the hugest omission, but it does further support the argument that Bethesda were more concerned with making a good shooter game than with producing a deep and interesting RPG.

Fallout 4 is by no means a bad game. Not by a long shot. Bethesda showed once again that they are experts in creating vivid game worlds and offering a masterclass in visual storytelling. If this game had come out as a new IP, I imagine it would have received significantly less criticism. Unfortunately, Fallout 4 ended up being the slightly disappointing child that could never live up to its parents expectations, and it shall be forever doomed to the fate of living in the shadow of its more impressive older siblings.

[naernon]

OC Questionnaire - Estryon Thramian

Found this in my drafts, and decided to finish off what I had to distract from the tediousness of trying to decide what to do with the aspect of his backstory mentioned earlier. I filled this out according to how he was at the very start/before the events of Skyrim, unless stated to be what happens later on.

Feel free to use this for your own OCs, I don’t mind.

TW; Mentions of pregnancy (of a trans man). Also, some NSFW implications.

GENERAL

Name: Estryon Thramian

Alias(es): Estre is a little nickname Ondolemar took to using later on. Arelnian, the parent who carried him and the only one he met (they died when he was two, his father died prior to his birth), also called him this. It is also his birth-name. Perhaps a bit of projection on my part. I don’t mind my birth-name. (altho it could just be because if i do mind it, i’m in for bad time from it)

Gender: Male.

Age: 25 years old.

Place of birth: Sunhold, Summerset Isle.  Or rather, Alinor. Morning Star 19th, 4E 176 (The Ritual)

Spoken languages: Tamrielic and Altmeri. Unsure exactly how native languages vs the common tongue works in TES, but I’ll just assume/HC it’s either like Latin (commonly taught but not used in every-day conversation) or just very secondary compared to Tamrielic. So that’s the status on his knowledge of Altmeri. Also had a minor interest in Ayleidoon when he was younger, so he knows some basic vocab, but not too much. Like you know how some people go through HS and take the entirety of Spanish/German/Whichever for the full four years and as soon as they graduated they forgot all of it? That’s Estryon with Ayleidoon.

Sexual orientation: Gay.

Occupation: Thalmor agent. Mainly used in assassinations and to stoke the conflict in the Skyrim Civil War by framing (in murder, accusations of law-breaking, etc.), propaganda, etc. Prior to that, as I’ve recently elaborated, he was a member of a elite force in Summerset called the Accipiters. They’re, as said, are similar to the First AD’s Eyes of the Queen, except with more brutality and tendency to murder. They are charged with cutting down all heresy and resistance against the Thalmor in the Isles through more silent and undercover tactics. Through whatever course of events I settle with, he is suspended and demoted within the Accipiters and sent to Skyrim to work as, again, a basic Thalmor agent for the time being. It’s not like he’s put into a useless job. Thalmor forces in Skyrim, according to this , are rather stretched thin, and with someone as combat skilled as Estryon, his work is much, much needed. Doesn’t mean he likes it, though. He hates it.

APPEARANCE

Eye color: Vibrant yellow/amber.

Hair color: Pale cream/blonde color.

Height: 6′ to 6′3/4. Haven’t decided.

Scars: Slight slashes/cuts on his right cheek and a scar on his right bicep. Likes to use… risky methods in his assassinations because he’s a dumbass and that has given him a few severely close calls on fatal weak spots; there’s a medium-length scar across his left abdomen, a shallow, light scar on his collarbone (was an attempt at his heart), and a few small ones on his thighs.

Burns: No major ones, but a lot of little burn marks because 1.) He sucks at cooking and 2.) Little mishaps in destruction magic usage.

Overweight: No.

Underweight: No.

FAVOURITE

Color: Yellow.

Hair color: He likes lighter hair colors but it’s not a huge factor.

Eye color: Yellow, but as said, not too much of a preference.

Entertainment: Horse-back riding. Causing general issues and difficulty for those around him. Taking care of horses. This man really likes horses. He also has a fondness for burning different stuff he finds, some of that stuff being important shit to someone other than him. There’s one major entertainment he commits to a lot but I’ll leave that unmentioned for modesty’s sake.

Pastime: This dude really does not do a lot to entertain himself other than [censored]. He spends a lot of time meandering and wandering and just.. being there. Either that or he rapidly switches between different pastimes because he can’t stay with one for the life of him. (he gets bored very, very easily) But. If anything, as said, he likes to experiment with magic and alchemy, and he loves horseback-riding and taking pleasure rides. This easy tendency towards boredom leads to recklessness and an unhealthy lust for thrill and adventure.

Food: As typical of Sunhold natives, he gravitates towards sea-food and he likes crab. Not typical mudcrabs from just anywhere, however. As is common knowledge, there are a lot of different varieties of Mudcrabs and there’s one particular off the coast of Sunhold that is high-demand and very flavorful. But other than that, he has a guilty sweet tooth in general, and he B U S  T S  A  N U T for vanilla ice cream.

Drink: He’s boring. He just likes water. He enjoys some lighter alcohol, though,  and perhaps some tea, but again. Water.

Books: Enjoys magic studies and books. Doesn’t like a lot of heavy-information stuff other than that, though, but he does like a bunch of light interests like aromatics and alchemy. He has Arelnian and their large array of aromatic/alchemy books + store to thank for those two interests.

HAVE THEY

Passed university: Yes.

Had sex: Pft. Yeah.

Had sex in public: Depends. Like, straight up banging in like, a marketplace? Nah.

Gotten pregnant: No. Not during the events of Skyrim, at least. Not until much later.

Kissed a man: Yes.

Kissed a woman: Yes, once or twice.

Gotten tattoos: Yes. Little ones. He has an eagle wing on each side of each of his ankles, and the Dominion emblem on the back of his neck. All hurt like Hell (especially the Dominion emblem one) and he’s kind of halted off of getting any after that.

Gotten piercings: Ear piercings, yeah. He typically likes small gold hoops or little jewels, but he tends to go through long periods of time where he doesn’t have any in.

Been in love: Yes.

Had a broken heart: Oof. Yeah.

Stayed up for more than 24 hours: Yes. He oftentimes has trouble sleeping. Has been that way since he was little, according to Ohtehil, at least.

ARE THEY

A virgin: Pft. No.

A cuddler: Not really, but, I mean. He’s not beyond it. He’s just not a very personal person in general.

A kisser: Yes.

A smoker: Not frequently, no.

Scared easily: Not typically, and even if he is, he takes care to not show it. He might flinch and recoil and you can get a little bit of a gasp from him but other than that, no. Unless it’s something incredibly outlandish or unnatural or… terrifying. Like a dragon. A large, ebony black dragon with red eyes flying from the mountains and passing over you, rumbling the ground and triggering all your fight or flight instincts. Yeah. Kinda scary. (but even then all he did was dive out of sight and hide underneath a little rock overhang. he may have taken a bit of a tumble in the process but i’ll have you know his cold altmeri exterior ™ was still in-tact)

Jealous easily: Gods, yes. He wouldn’t let that be known, however.

Trustworthy: Absolutely Not

Dominant: In terms of personality, yeah. He hates being told what to do, he thrives on spiting others, and while he is quite reserved and quiet he still manages to be…. over-bearing and dominant. He has three very particular methods of getting what he wants and one of them is a glare that could kill and keeping all words to the minimum, while also having those words cut sharp. Does that make sense? He’s one of those people that just have an overpowering presence without the need to speak. That’s one reason he doesn’t have a lot of friends, really. Anyways. One other method is straight-up killing whoever he wishes to and the other… Well. If you’re talking dominance in bed, he adapts to what is needed, wanted, or what he’s in the mood for. Whatever leaves his target vulnerable to a swift kill, framing, or easy investigation of possible heresy/conspiracy. So yes, actually, I guess he is dominant. Quite so.

Submissive: In any other context other than the Spicee (tm) one, no, not really. If in that context, then, only if he wishes to be.

Single: Yes, no committal relationship until later. Although, there was one earlier, but I haven’t developed it completely. I’ll give a little peek. It was with Thalmor Agent Sanyon. That dead Thalmor, at a Talos shrine? Yeah. High-school sweethearts, if you will. Estryon finding Sanyon’s body at the shrine, or rather, going there at all ultimately sets the course of the events of the main questline. That little event, along with Ohtehil’s little ‘turn-into-a-werewolf-and-slaughter-all-your-colleagues’ theatrical go hand-in-hand in starting it all. Estryon finding Sanyon dead would not have happened at all if not for Ohtehil, actually.

RANDOM QUESTIONS

Have they harmed themselves: Minor things.

Thought of suicide: Yes.

Attempted suicide: No.

Wanted to kill someone: Yes.

Actually killed someone: Yes.

Ridden a horse: Yes. He’s quite the horseman.

Have/had a job: Yes.

Have any fears: He isn’t too fond of heights. Or blood.

FAMILY

Sibling(s): Ohtehil (22 years older) and Tretlas (55 years older).

Parents: Arelnian and Ciryarel Thramian. Both fought in the Great War/First War of the Empire on the Dominion’s side. Ciryarel was a skilled mage who worked rather high up in the Dominion and Arelnian was also well-respected as an informant and recruiter stationed primarily in Hammerfell. Ciryarel perished in the final battle and Arelnian received significant injury. Survived two years post-War, but a highly weakened immune system as a result of the injuries ultimately cost them their life.

Children: No. Later, however, he does adopt Lucia and Sofie and does have Diatres, his only biological child.

Pets: Cyrel, a smokey black and sleek Summerset-bred mare. Had her imported upon the discovery he would be suspended in Skyrim for longer than anticipated. Prior to that, she was being boarded for a rather expensive price over at the Sunhold stables. And then Umaril, a “Pocket” Salamander. Ohtehil got it for him for his 9th birthday not anticipating a long lifespan nor the HUGE size they grow to be. Once it started growing alarmingly fast and large Ohtehil figured as long as Estryon was enjoying himself it would be fine; once he grew older he could get rid of it if he tired of taking care of such a massive and intelligent creature. Estryon did not get rid of it. Quite the opposite. He’s the dude to have a suspiciously large bag being lugged around and you see him stop once he’s in the clear, unzip it, and suddenly his dog or in this case a very large monitor pokes his head out. His commitment to Umaril and Cyrel is incredible compared to his dedication towards actual people.