Saw a mudcrab the other day.

[nano_moose]

Trapped in Skyrim playthrough, send help.

(The leader of the Thieves' Guild is voiced by Stephen Russell, and his name is Mercer Frey. It's like some sort of fandom singularity.)

Comments

[squeemu.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I wanted to ask you this back when I first saw your post and then I promptly forget FOREVER until now.

My definition of forever is maybe inaccurate, but whatever.

Skyrim vs Dragon Age: go. (Basically, there were a lot of parts that annoyed me about playing through DA, and I want to know whether Skyrim has the same things that bothered me. Except I don't know if I can put my finger on what it is that bothered me about DA. There just seemed to be a lot of... running around that I didn't care about. The ratio of running around to plot was not satisfactory. And I didn't like the fact that if you wanted to learn about the huge world they'd built up, you had to read about it instead of getting most of it through the storyline/missions.)

[nano_moose]

I can tell you right now, if you dislike lore, The Elder Scrolls is probably not for you.

...Okay, here's the deal. The developers of Skyrim wanted to make a world that felt like it had a very deep sense of history, and more than that, of history that has been fought over and magically warped and misrepresented and lost and found and misheard and badly translated and lied about. There are several metric fucktons of reading involved in building a vague timeline of Tamriel's past, and that's if you believe the sources, which are almost never one hundred percent reliable. You might find a crisply written, concise and clear report on why Talos Septim, the Ninth Divine, was not truly a mortal ascended to godhood - commission the High Elves, who have a vested interest in Talos' divinity being questioned and probably also have racially-motivated dislike for a man who became a god (because humans are inherently inferior to them). You might also find the badly-spelled, semi-coherent rambling of a man saying that Akatosh (the Dragon God of Time) and Alduin (the World Eater, harbinger of the endtimes, and also a dragon; sometimes seen as an aspect of Akatosh) cannot possibly be the same entity because his dad told him and he heard one day in a tavern and so on, and that could actually be very close to the truth. Personally, I LOVE IT ALL LIKE BURNING. But it's heavy stuff. Often it's not even relevant, the way history books about the Middle Ages aren't entirely applicable in modern times. There is fiction-within-the-fiction. Stories written to be stories in-universe. (Many of them are short stories with twist endings that I found very clever.) But! Unlike Dragon Age, it is not vital.

ARGH LENGTH LIMIT

[nano_moose]

Really, the main difference between Skyrim and Dragon Age is that Dragon Age is about the characters, and Skyrim is about the setting. In Dragon Age, the most memorable moment is probably in a conversation - a heartfelt declaration of love, a wistful reminiscence about lost friends, a goofy argument amongst your party members. In Skyrim, it'll be standing at the top of a mountain and casting a spell to part the clouds so you can see from one end of the continent to the other, or arranging your home just right, or walking into the deepest reaches of an abandoned city and finding a second city beneath it in a huge cavern filled with giant glowing blue mushrooms. In Dragon Age your weapons are bought and sold for better versions. In Skyrim you can smith your own damn weapon and enchant it to your liking once you have the gold, the materials, the skill and the equipment (which you'll need to explore for). In Dragon Age, the dwarves are the last bastion against the dark hoards with a strict caste-based society and a lot of political murk. In Skyrim, the dwarves vanished, every one of them, all at once, centuries ago, and no one exactly knows why or where they went - just that they left behind vast underground cities full of bizarre bronze-coloured metal creatures for you, naturally, to go poking through. In Dragon Age, your party contains a handful of characters with distinct plot arcs and interactions. In Skyrim, it's hard telling one follower from another, and I'll be honest in saying I rarely bother with them. In Dragon Age, the plot shapes the way you explore, even if you're doing random side-quests. In Skyrim, you can just run off in a random direction straight out of the tutorial and get involved in wacky hijinks that have nothing to do with anything and just fuck around for several ingame months while the plot waits patiently for you to trigger it. I have literally spent hours collecting books to stack in my home library and devising a rough sorting-system for them.

However, Bethesda's writing and voice-acting chops are several magnitudes below BioWare's. I would almost bet my house they hired Stephen Russell because the guy has excellent range so they could pay one man to voice roughly a bazillion different characters, and some of the other VAs either haven't actually been paid or had to have the moments when they read the script directions aloud edited out. (Stephen Russell is EVERYWHERE. He's a lot of generic male Bretons and Bosmer, most of the Thieves Guild, a chunk of the Assassins Guild, one shady mage, several noblemen and some pirates. Then there's Wes Johnson, who's the God of Madness, a dead assassin, Skyrim's answer to the Joker and basically Cthulhu. And Jim Cummings, who's...everyone. Everywhere. Everyone.)

But there are Icelandic accents. Which is awesome.

...Also Skyrim is more First Person Shooter-y. Pick a weapon, spell, power and/or shield and go on your merry way, with Stamina and Magicka as ammunition and Health very gradually restoring itself outside of fights. Dragon Age is more DnD, with positioning and forethought factoring into encounters.

I have no idea if any of that helps.

[squeemu.livejournal.com]

I need to ask someone who isn't so good at making the things they love sound so awesome. YOU DO THIS TO ME EVERY TIME, NANO.

It was actually very helpful! And I continue to be conflicted, because on the one hand, I... am not a huge fan of lore, when it's not related to the characters. On the other hand, it sounds like the biggest sandbox to play in EVER, and in a way, the setting itself sounds like the character. So. And I do dearly love unreliable narrators and puzzles to figure out. Not. Not literal puzzles, though. And I think that if I do play it, knowing what to expect will vastly improve my chances of enjoying it.

The prevalence of lore has been one of my major problems with video games of late, though, and I'm not really sure why. Probably some combination of breaking the flow of gameplay (they're too long! and heavy!) and having less patience for devoting a huge chunk of time to video games.

How many NPCs are in Skyrim? Like, are there towns of people? A few isolated camps? A spectrum?

Also, d'aww, Stephen Russell. And now I really want to go pick Thief back up again, except the only computer I had that was able to play it is dead. D: