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Diary of a Dragonborn Intermission 1


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DIARY OF A DRAGONBORN - INTERMISSION 1
Previous: Chapter 9, I Am Dragonborn

 

I guess I should stop and explain a few things about this particular Skyrim playthrough.

 

The reader may have noticed that I'm skipping around a bunch. I've yet to follow through on any of my "professions." This is partly because, to be honest, most "professions," such as miner, or farmer, or even dragonslayer, are part-time at best. Honestly, I'm not expecting Sims-level diversity here, but when you try to be a miner and you clean out the mine after five minutes of pickaxe-whirling, there's not much incentive to stick around. The most consistent job in Skyrim is Courier, because the most consistent quest in Skyrim is Fetch.

 

The other major reason for my constant seeking of new professions is that most of the extant ones are really stupid. And not stupid in a good way, as in "this is so stupid I've got to see it through to poke fun at it" but more like... well, consider the mage guild quests. The entire setup was gormless, the quests themselves mostly milquetoast, and the only real reaction I can work myself up to is "meh." The rewards aren't spectacular, and especially not worth the actual game time it takes to get them. The major questlines, and here I'm particularly thinking about the civil war questlines, are cookie-cutter blah stuff. I get that Elder Scrolls roots are in the traditional tabletop RPG, and that involved almost entirely dungeon raiding and monster killing, but in an open-world CRPG that ostensibly tries to be all things to all people, there is a distressing lack of depth. Most of the time that's fine - the game mechanics are solid enough that you'll enjoy playing no matter what you do - but I can't really write about nothingness. I stopped being a mage not because I stopped having fun as a mage, or because it was too hard, or because I particularly wanted to play something else, but because I got bored writing about it. Trust me, I can play the game to absolute death - Steam logs my playtime as over 1,700 hours, and I've played and become archmage several times, but I can only rehash it in text form for so long before I come to the realization that it's all very samey.

 

I never played Arena, my start in the series began at Daggerfall. Morrowind got more depth and narrower focus, Oblivion sacrificed some of that in favor of (admittedly much improved) mechanics, physics, and graphics, and Skyrim improves them even more... but I'm seeing a departure from Morrowind's depth and strength of story back to Daggerfall-like shallowness. Most of the quests in the game are hand-made, carefully scripted and built, but they end up feeling like quests made by a random number generator. I'm not talking about the "kill bandit" quests you get in taverns, or the guild-approved sidequests you get by joining the major factions - I'm talking about main questlines. Every last one is a prettily dressed-up fetch or kill quest. I grant you, there's not a lot you can do with scripted quests when you give the player so much freedom and agency, but to then deliberately design quests to limit that agency seems counterproductive. I get the feeling that Skyrim was built simultaneously by two different groups of designers - one group who tried to experiment with new and interesting things, and the other group with a severely specific background in traditional RPG tropes that tried to shoehorn every last one of them in. There are many places in the game, both mechanically, graphically, and within the context of the story, where you can honestly say to yourself "Aha, I see that designer X had a hand in this part." So I'll hop around the job boards, picking and choosing that which seems the most fun at that particular time. It's inconsistent, but I'd rather be random than burn myself out and stop writing altogether. Which actually did happen once, right around chapter 5, and I had to take a break for a few months.

 

Anyway, that's my problem. Your problem is that you don't see things that are going on behind the scenes. Frequently I'll complete quests I won't write about, specifically because of the aforementioned banality of those quests. I cannot adequately describe the beautiful scenery or level design, so mostly I just skip it entirely. I also cannot adequately describe most of the quests, story, NPC interaction, and general non-graphical environment, because there really isn't that much TO describe. So I never mentioned how I killed a mammoth and brought its tusk to Ysolda, or went through with stealing the ale for the town drunk, or stole a magic staff for the steward in Winterhold, or killed ice wraiths and brought their teeth to that dunmer food-vendor lady whose name escapes me at the moment. These things are so irrelevant that I couldn't force myself to chug out even a sentence or two about them. Even longer fetch quests like (for example) finding Noster's helmet in Steepfall Barrow I couldn't do anything with - it's an interesting little tidbit of lore, talking about the legion and how it's merely the military arm of a faceless and uncaring bureaucracy, and how well designed and pretty Steepfall Barrow is, but what could I say about it that I haven't already said before? Or someone else has said, and done a better job of it?

 

Which brings me to my next point, and this one is something of a problem. I've borrowed concepts quite liberally from other sources, particularly Adam DeCamp (chocolatehammer.org) and the whole group at Twenty Sided's Skyrim playthroughs (shamusyoung.com, look for Let's Play Skyrim), so the language of my writing may at times seem derivative. That's because it is. There are just so many things that other, more professional people can say about the game and its wacky hijinks that I can't do justice to, and so I try to mimic as much as possible from people who have a better sense of humor than I do. I've never committed exact theft, and my most egregious and flagrant lift I believe is in Chapter 6, Dropout. Please forgive me for borrowing the thoughts of others when my own are inadequate.

 

Anyway, the last piece of this intermission deals with the mods I'm running. I am not running vanilla Skyrim, because vanilla Skyrim is just as shallow and banal as modded Skyrim, but less pretty. So I run a lot of mods. So if I end up mentioning something in my playthrough that doesn't exist in the vanilla game, or not mentioning something obvious that does, that's why. I was going to include my load order, but I really can't be arsed, so just know that I'm running a lot of mods. But no sexlab mods for this playthrough. Maybe next time.

 

Next: Chapter 10, A Strange Dress Code
Start at Chapter 1

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Well, I for one appreciate the humour in your writing, original or "inspired" being irrelevant here, since I don't know the sites you mentioned. Your stories are also incredibly recognisable, which is possibly why the humour works so well. Maybe a feast of recognition at the, sometimes, inane or shallow (predictable) gameplay in Skyrim. More than once you made me laugh out loud with your descriptions, so well done there. And it makes me want to read the next installment to see what observations you come up with next.

 

So please, keep posting!

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If you mean the Illusion playthrough link... that site is very good, his codified "Murder, She Wrote" plot is brilliant, as is his suggested alternate ending for Bioshock.

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If you mean the Illusion playthrough link... that site is very good, his codified "Murder, She Wrote" plot is brilliant, as is his suggested alternate ending for Bioshock.

I love game analysis and game reviews. I can happily spend hours just reading and watching stuff like this. Especially when I'm supposed to be working.

http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/extra-punctuation

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/

http://www.chocolatehammer.org/

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/experienced-points

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