(no subject)

[camwyn]

Got the Skyrim edition with all the official DLC included from the used game bin a while ago. I've been watching a friend of mine play through (this is the same person who periodically asks me about Objectivist stuff, who genuinely thought Khal Drogo was going to live because he was too important to die, and who, on a playthrough of Fallout 4, managed to kill Arthur Maxson with a bottlecap mine while Arthur was making a Great Big Messianic Speech- he doesn't like Great Big Messianic Speechifiers). Neither of us has played any of the other Elder Scrolls games, although I absorbed a little about the setting through RPG applications and have been trying to catch up on the lore through the Elder Scrolls wiki before attempting a playthrough of my own.

My friend is at level 80 or 81 or so and has yet to do the quest that starts dragons appearing in Skyrim. You know. The very first quest on the actual main quest storyline. He's carrying the dragonstone around in his inventory and he knows damn well what it is, but he won't talk to the wizard who asked him to search for it. Because he figures hey, if the game designers didn't want him to play the game like that, they shouldn't have made it possible for him to do that. And he likes exploring Skyrim without worrying that NPCs he cares about are going to get dragoned to death. (He also hasn't switched on the vampire attacks yet, but that's more because he just doesn't especially care to start the Dawnguard material, and his response to NPCs saying 'OMG vampires burned down the Hall of the Vigilant!' is 'too bad so sad' anyway.)

Also, although he hasn't been able to read every book he encounters, he's been doing his best to read as many of the in-game books as possible, and has come to the conclusion from the histories he's turned up that he would rather live in Tamriel than Thedas. Even knowing about the Oblivion Crisis and the Dragon Breaks and everything he's learned about the Thalmor. (He's been muttering about their Elf superiority/racial purity and the Bosmer getting Sudetenlanded, among other things.)

"If nothing else," he says, "Nirn as a setting has a head of the pantheon who actually bothered to show up. Akatosh beats the Maker on that point alone."

I haven't gotten completely caught up on the lore because there is OMG SO MUCH, but it's a little hard to argue.

Comments

[telophase]

I didn't bother with the dragons until I was past level 50 this time because in my first go-through I was unable to fight them effectively and I got tired of constantly dying. And I set up a mod to turn vampire attacks off for much the same reason. :)

[autographedcat]

My character never did finish the main storyline, despite doing literally every single thing available on the rest of the game. She just couldn't be bothered.

Monks: "You are the Dragonborne, whom prophecy fortold would save the worl..."
Me: "Bored now. Hey, what's over here?"
Monks: "Wait, come back! The dragons...!"
Me: (calling over shoulder): "I'm gonna go this way!"

(PS. Guessing there's little chance of ever getting the ending to Janice's story? :) )

[mishaday]

Steam tells me I have spent thousands of hours in Skyrim (both original and shiny updated version). It can't tell me how much time I've spent on the Xbox.

In all that time, I've gone through the main questline... once. It's such a big world with just another little corner to explore just around the bend... and then I found mods, with HUGE expansions of the world or remakes or whatever - I'm still surprised by things in the vanilla game. It's one of the joys of the game in how flexible it is.