Rather, the companion I appreciate most is my trusty golden horse whom I finally bought after twenty hours or so, and he’s my friend and escort in the wide world map. I didn’t realize exactly why you were supposed to buy a horse, but now I wish I’d gotten one earlier. I thought they were just for getting around a bit faster, but what I didn’t realize is that through some weird interpretation of physics, they can climb  most of the steep surfaces that my character cannot. I was complaining about jump and climbing mechanics in my last post, but the horse solves all these problems, and makes navigating those treacherous mountains a great deal easier. It might not exactly conform to the laws of science as you can park your horse on a 75 degree slope with no problem, but it does do an effective job of solving a fundamental gameplay problem.

I’ve mentioned how dominating my character is now, and while it’s cool to see him evolve, it’s almost sort of an issue. I feel like most of the time now I just stumble into whatever ruins or cave I’m supposed to be invading, whack everything with my mace of doom, and kill the boss and find the treasure. I’ve actually been really enjoying watching my roommate play his character, a summoning, archery-skilled wood elf who relies on stealth. In each room, he slowly slinks in, snipes everyone with his bow, and if he is detected, summons a spirit wolf and rains down arrows from afar. At merely level ten, I’ve watching him take down giants already through sneaking and strafing, and it’s a very cool playstyle.

Everyone you see here will give you a quest. Even the dog.

It is one, however, that makes the game a great deal more challenging, and much of the time in a frustrating way. Creeping around everywhere makes every dungeon take twice as long, and when there is a boss who charges straight at you, there’s nothing you can do to defend against it if your spirit wolf dies in one hit and you can only get off two arrows before a battle axe smashes into your face.

As for mages? I can’t speak for them, but if I ever do return to this game, I’ll try that sort of character and see how it goes. I feel like it’s a much more technical option, and you’re really going to have to plan what you do with each encounter rather than run in like me wearing adamantium armor swinging a mace forged by the devil himself.

To this moment, I’m still just in pure awe of the world that’s been created here. It’s literally one of the most breathtaking video game worlds ever created, and even the dungeon design is fantastic as there’s nothing at all that feels clone stamped about the game, which is normally a staple of games like this. Sure, the dungeons are linear, but they’re well designed, and I really do appreciate the little backdoor exit they built into each one that doesn’t force you to backtrack through 20 minutes of dungeon again.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention this, but it’s something that I discovered that’s a timesaver ,but also another minor gripe with poor design that I feel could have been easily fixed. The problems with Skyim’s unnecessarily laborious menu system has been well-documented, but I was at least glad to learn that you can in fact hotkey items for quick selecting, and don’t have to pop open the favorites menu EVERY time. You can map two things to either left or right on the D-pad, and though useful, it’s far from a perfect system.

I have my shield and mace as my go-tos in my left and right hand. I wanted to have a healing spell and a bow as my two alternates. The system is screwed up though, as I’ll select healing, which will pop up on my left hand ,but after I use it, when I press left again to go back to my shield, what does it do? It makes BOTH my hands healing? What? For what reason would I ever possibly want to do that? That means I need to make my shield my quick select on the other side, or else I’d have to go into the menu and manually select it. But even if I was able to make the bow my alternate, pressing it once to equip is fine and dandy, but pressing it again does nothing, and I have to back into the menu to manually unselect it and get my other items back. Why they didn’t make pressing each of these hotkey twice switch back to what you had before is a mystery to me, and I have to believe that this could have been better done, and hopefully is something that can be fixed in a patch.

Yes, my next character will probably be a female mage. Check back next year when I start that game.

Outside of poor design in menu and quickselect, I’ve encountered very few actual glitches, though when they do hit, they’re major. I ran across one in a Daedric quest for Azura’s star that literally just put a boulder in front of the door I was supposed to go through. Usually, you think of a glitch to be something really obvious, like the door would just be stuck shut or something, but this was a literal part of the landscape, and I wandered around the cave for half an hour trying to understand what I was supposed to do. I finally consulted online walkthroughs, and after a half hour of online searching with no mention of such a boulder, I came across a brief note that said it was in fact a glitch, and I need to leave the cave and come back to make the boulder disappear. Uh, what? But it worked.

I’ve found that Skyrim, like most of these games, requires a Wiki to help you sometimes. Yes, in situations like the one I’ve described, but sometimes it’s just literally not possible to do things without consulting an online guide. Right now, I have a fetch quest that has me hunting down 24 stones as one of my main objectives, not a miscellaneous quest. To get it off my screen, I need to find all of these items scattered around the world. With probably close to a thousand locations, there would be literally no way to find them all without help. The same goes for quests which give you no direct objective, as you can either spend 50 more hours randomly searching for something in the world, or a minute finding the info online. Yes, a certain amount of exploration is fun, and what makes these games great, but some of these quests simply aren’t able to be completed without help, and as these Wikis are just now being built online, there are a few quests that have me actually stuck until I can find more information on them. That Daedric one would have been one of them if not for that helpful glitch tip.

I love this game, I really do. I wouldn’t have put 45 hours into it otherwise, and I’m sure I’ll be over 100 by the time I’m done. That said, the last ten or so have felt a bit repetitive as my character has become something of an unstoppable juggernaut, and I think perhaps a break is in order over Thanksgiving before I pick things up in full again. WAY down the road, I’ll try to be a mage, but I can’t imagine starting all this over any time soon. Right now I’ll keep playing in this style, and have some final thoughts when I beat the game in another week or two.