Good News! Skyrim Doesn't Suck!

Check out my dude!

When a game asks, "How big of a beard do you want?"
Then the only proper answer is, "How big do they get?"

You know how some people like to make their character look exactly like themselves? Well, I decided to create a character that will look exactly like me after I'm finished playing Skyrim.

In case you couldn't tell by how awesome he looks, my dude is a wizard. I don't bother with swords and crap. I don't even strap on any armor. I just crawl out of bed, throw on a robe, and that's all I need to scare the shit out of the local bandits, because when I lift up my hand, people die.

My adventure started out epic and it's only gone up from there, starting with my own execution (which I, of course, escaped), a dragon attack, and lots of, "we gotta get the hell out of here!" running and fighting. It's a bit more intense than Patrick Stewart telling you about his dreams.



And the whole time this is going on I'm thinking, "No way I'm playing this game."

Because it's good. Really good. Right down to picking flowers. Even that part's been improved.

It used to be, when you picked a flower in an Elder Scrolls game, the flower would look exactly the same afterwards.

But now it goes away! Fascinating!

Granted, picking flowers isn't very epic, but you gotta remember that this isn't a flower-picking game. It's a dragon-slaying, epic-adventuring, super-game in which you can also pick flowers, which makes it even better.





Oh! Did I mention that you can dual wield magic!!!! It's probably the best feature ever put into a video game.


Like when you're out in the woods and this wolf attacks you, thinking he's only dealing with a wizard who can cast one spell at a time.

What the wolf doesn't realize is that you can cast two different spells at the same time, or you can just cast one super-powerful spell with both hands and incinerate that fucking wolf!

Something that really caught me off guard was when a ten-year-old girl ran up to me, in the middle of the town market, and started talking shit about how she could kick my ass up and down the street, and I was like, "What the fuck are you doing in this game?"
Because as a general rule, you never see kids in open world games, because open world games are expected to give their players the freedom to be a complete fuck and kill anything that's breathing (or not breathing, since there's lots of undead in this game), and no development team wants to be pegged as, "The guys who made that game where you kill children."

I didn't incinerate the girl, so I'm still not sure if you actually can burn kids alive in this game or if they just laugh it off, but having kids running around really adds to the game's atmosphere.

Maybe I don't set children on fire, but I did eat a human heart, once.
I wanted to know what it'd taste like.
Because that's what wizards do.
You don't fuck with wizards.

In previous Elder Scrolls games, people would either completely ignore you until you talked to them or they'd try to kill you, but in Skyrim you've got a whole range of assholes; like some guys who try to goad you into a fight by calling you a pussy, and then you've got camps that, when they see you coming, will tell you to fuck off or they'll stick some arrows into you. I even found a camp of guys who were drunk as shit and invited me to join in. Little things like this really pull you into the experience. Calling the game immersive is an understatement.

And while the AI is definitely improved, it still has some quirks.