Get your own damn claw back...

[Kendo 2]

Skyrim has been out for a while now and I'm always looking for new things to do.  Having gone through Bleakfalls Barrow several times since 2011 I decided to see if Lucan Valerius really did need my help.

 

I stared with a new character and I ran through tutorial Helgen.  I mean RAN; I didn't pick up anything other than the Helgen Keep Key (from a chest) or fight anything.  I was out of there in less than 5 minutes real time and I only got hit once.  From there I beat feet to Riverwood and talked to Lucan to get the quest started.

 

Looking at Lucan and his store he has some options.  Lucan wears normal clothes, is armed with an iron mace and he has a few assorted low level potions at his disposal.  Looking at my character, he has sack cloth rag clothing and is unarmed.  I know there is a free wood axe next to the mill so I grab that and Camilla sees me off on my first adventure.

 

On the way there I have to fight a wolf.  It bites me a few times and I kill it.  The first real obstacle is a watch tower with three bandits.  I can either try and sneak past them or fight.  I opt for the fight.  I hid and waited until the bandit archer and the one leaning against the tree are close together and I attacked.  I bum-rushed the archer and killed her first so she couldn't stand back and pump me full of arrows and then I finished off the other bandit (a khajitt this time with a war hammer).  I lost about half my Health but now I have crappy bandit armor and crappy bandit weapons.  There is another bandit at the top of the tower and he's wearing iron armor and he has a shield too.   About a minute later that stuff is mine too and there is food and a treasure chest near by.

 

So now I'm decked out in my full set of iron armor and I'm armed with an iron mace and a long bow with 7 iron arrows.  I also have 5 cabbages, three carrots, two minor healing potions, one stamina and 27 gold pieces.  Ready to face the world...

 

When I get to the Bleakfalls exterior I check things out.  I see one bandit as a lookout and I get a lucky shot with the bow and kill him while sneaking (x2 Damage!).  Up the stairs there are two more bandits and I use the same tactic as before; bum rush the archer and then deal with the melee type afterwards.  I have better luck this time and my newly acquired armor and weapons help a lot.  As a bonus one of the bandits was armed with a steel war axe so now I have a better weapon.  Things are looking up and I now have 28 iron arrows, 6 lock picks and a bottle of mead!

 

Once inside I see the carnage of skeevers vs bandits and two bandits standing next to a fire talking.  I listen long enough to hear the claw is with someone named 'Arvel' and he's deeper inside the dungeon. Checking out the two bandits it is the same combo; one archer, one not.  Going on my luck so far, I shoot the archer while sneaking (no x2 Damage bonus this time but she dies anyway) and I make quick work of the one remaining.  I even get a power attack with the slo-mo kill cam this time.  I'm that awesome.

 

There's chest nearby and its locked.  Luckily I have picks.  Break two and the chest opens.  The goodies inside are disappointing but I now have 56 gold, another minor healing potion and a hunting bow.  After I loot all of the bodies I decide to celebrate so I eat the cabbages and carrots, drink the mead and take a nap on the bed rolls.

 

After my nap I get back to the claw business.  Along the way there are funeral urns and I take what's inside them.  I'm now a grave robber...  There are a few twists and turns and that's when I meet the first do-or-die challenge; the bandit outlaw.  Going with my new well-established tactic I shoot him with my hunting bow...and he doesn't die.  It doesn't even faze him.  In fact he turns and charges me!  Now I'm scared and fighting for my life.  He's kicking my ass to the point where I have to use my precious minor healing potions just to survive the fight.  But survive it I do.  As a reward I get a torch and stuff worse than what I'm already using.  Out of frustration I loot his body anyway.  Luckily there was another minor healing potion on a shelf so at least I have one now.

 

After working the puzzle gate I get to my first real treasure.  There is a chest and it has a a ruby and steel horned helmet along with a potion of minor magika and more gold.  It's not much but it's something.  There is also a petty soul gem, but I have no idea what I'm going to do with it.  I take it anyway.

 

As I go down the wooden stairs I'm attacked by three leaping skeevers.  These bastards are going for my new steel helmet!  I manage to chop down two before the third one gets past my shield and doses me with Rock Joint.  Great...-25 Stamina out of my original 100.  That sucks but there is nothing I can do about it.

 

After the skeevers there is a room and I find some good stuff; a scroll of fireball along with a weak potion of paralyzation.  Now this shit might come in handy!  Down the hall way I hear someone calling for help and to be cut down.  If they are tied up they aren't going anywhere so I do a little searching and I find a chest.  Of course it is locked and of course it is apprentice level and OF COURSE I use all four of my remaining lock picks to try and get it open.  I fail miserably so I guess I'm not meant to have what's inside it.

 

Turning my attention to the voice calling for help I see a room filled with webs and I have to chop my way inside.  I recognize this from my dash through Helgen.  Webs + egg sacs + desiccated skeevers = giant spiders.  Sure enough there is a huge funnel web on the ceiling and it is between me and this guy stuck in a web calling for help.  Yeah...riiiight...  So I start to sneak in with my hunting bow and iron arrows ready.  That's when a spider the size a Volkswagen drops down almost on top of me.  Of course I panic and run.  Fuck that dude caught in the web.

 

I manage to get away without being bitten or having venom spit on me so I count my blessings and sneak back.  That big MF spider is there and it looks like it is trying to tickle the guy caught in the web.  He's screaming and I can't say that I blame him.  In a stroke of genius I use the paralyzation poison on the bow and shoot the spider from behind. X2 DAMAGE! and it locks up stiff so I pump it full of arrows and it dies.

 

Now this asshole caught in the web is insisting that I cut him down.  The spider is dead and he's not going anywhere so I case the room for loot.  Grave robber that I am now, I get a garnet gem, one minor stamina potion and 7 gold from two funeral urns.  Checking the desiccated human corpses yields a lock pick, that I break on the chest I couldn't open before.  Out of frustration I hit it with my axe but it doesn't do anything.

 

Back to the guy stuck in the web, it is indeed Arvel and he has the claw.  FINALLY...  But Arvel is a thief and a con so he has much game with his 'cut me down and I'll give it to you' line.  Uhuh...  In the process of cutting him down I might have accidentally hit him two or three times with power attacks.  So Arvel is dead and I have the claw.  THE END.

 

So I guess Lucan Valerius could have gotten the Golden Claw back on his own.  I started off in a worse state.  He's 4th level with a bunch of resources laying around in his store.  I was 1st level and literally had nothing.  I never used the start Healing or Flame spells (since Lucan doesn't have those) and just relied on what I could pick up or loot from bodies.  If my 1st level character could do it I know he could have done it too.

 

I guess that's why we players are defined as 'adventures' in the game.  We are the schmucks NPCs get to do their dirty work for them.  It is our gaming lot in life to be suckers but it's not so bad.  After my little run to get the claw back I went through and collected everything from everyone I had killed and after selling it I came up with about 500 gold pieces.  Not bad for about 14 game scale hours of work.  There's that, and if I had finished the quest to the end I'd have the option to bang his sister.

 

Disclaimer: I have no idea why I typed this out other than being bored on a Sunday and wanting to have a little fun with something we've all experienced in the game.  If anyone wants to input or share their own thoughts/experiences with this or other game scenarios please feel free.

[LexTalionis]

I think my favorite part of the fallout games was that you could pretty much always just say "No, fuck you and your sickly bighorners and your enslaved children." Always the No option. But in skyrim, it's "Pitiful lowlife turned out to be Dragonborn, my cat Squeaker i stuck in that tree. Could you get him down for me?" as you are being chased by a swarm of angry skeletons summoned up by some bad-tempered necromancer who you happened to walk by, minding your own business while he was doing whatever the fuck they do out there.

 

Also, my wiife has nightmares about that volkswagon sized arachnid of which you spoke from her first playthrough.

[Mister X]

I think my favorite part of the fallout games was that you could pretty much always just say "No, fuck you and your sickly bighorners and your enslaved children." Always the No option. But in skyrim, it's "Pitiful lowlife turned out to be Dragonborn, my cat Squeaker i stuck in that tree. Could you get him down for me?" as you are being chased by a swarm of angry skeletons summoned up by some bad-tempered necromancer who you happened to walk by, minding your own business while he was doing whatever the fuck they do out there.

 

Also, my wiife has nightmares about that volkswagon sized arachnid of which you spoke from her first playthrough.

 

Oh c'mon, it never ever has the size of a VW. Maybe a Prius. BTW, did you, that when you're going down the highway in a Prius and you put the hand out of the window, the vehicle would turn?

 

And because of those ugly forced quests I've installed The choice is yours. That was one of the most annoying things I've experienced in normal Skyrim: "Hey, you, you look like some low leveled bitch who has nothing better to do than searching another bitch around this town!" - "Erm, no, I just got called to visit the Greybeards?!" - "Oh well, ignore them. If you find the woman, we'll rap... erm, pay you  ..." New Quest: Find that Redguard bitch in Whiterun.

And I just wanted to leave that fucking town with its fucking inhabitants, like Nazeem or this Talos priest! FUZ you all, I'm out!

[Veladarius]

Everyone in Whiterun is rather stingy on the rewards. "Thanks for warning us about the dragons. Here, have this piece of shit armor someone found in a barrel someplace." I always want to tell Balgruf when he says I have the most experience with a dragon that my experience is in running away and I plan to practice that skill some more.

[Kendo 2]

I don't set foot in Whiterun until after 20th level now.  There are things to do in the game that don't involve that lame-ass city or the annoying dialogue of its inhabitants.  By waiting until I'm higher level, the bullshit rewards handed out by NPCs are actually worth something, if only to sell or destroy for the enchantments they have.  That doesn't fix the worse game dialogue in Bethesda history though.  You're Dragonborn and you've saved the world from Alduin?  You're the master of the Thieve's Guild, Listener of the Dark Brotherhood, Archmage of Winterhold?  All four at once?  The NPCs still talk to you like you're a first level dickhead straight out of Helgen.  A lot of times I just turn the volume off so I don't have to hear the pathetic bullshit Bethesda dev-nerds think is cute or funny.

I'm to the point now where I don't finish any of the main quests.  I do just enough to get the NPCs out of their intro behaviors and dialogues and I never go back to them unless it is to trade or train.  Anyway, playing the game now is boring and doing original mesh work for it is a pain in the ass.  They need to finish that Enderal thing so I'll have something new to do with Skyrim.

[oel-za]

A little off-topic, but kinda related. I started a new playthrough earlier this week with some alterations. 

• Main Quest Disabled
• Possibility to kill anyone
• No hints about being the Derpy Dragonborn
• Moral Compass in my own hands
• A lot of Questmods

when you have the chance to manipulate anyone to your liking, intended or not, the game takes a drastic change - at least for me. So there was this child pissing me off in Riverwood. Next he knows he has a dagger stuck in his throat. Shouldn't be a mouthful to strangers.

 

I had Amorous Adventure installed for a while but started to do the quests as they come - randomly. So I happen to be in Whiterun, because I needed to trade some trash in the General Goods' and there she was - Ysolda. I started the quest with the all generic "Get her the Mammoth Tusk", so I did get it. 

 

When I talked to the dude (Mikael?) inside the Tavern, he told me that Ysolda' is not interesting for him because she enjoys herself in a weird passion - the Mammoth Tusk was one of those items.

 

My character, a female with little to no remorse, thought that Ysolda' needs to meet her makers. She was not straightforward why she needed that item, so I lured her inside a backroom in the General Goods' store and cut her stomach open and watched her bleed to death. As a message to others who may discover her corpse I placed the Mammoth Tusk on her head.

 

After I milked out the stores' goods I went out of Whiterun into the wilds. There I adventured over in the direction of Markath, over to Solitude (Erikur died a horrible death), back to Riften and kept picking up random quests as it went on. A lot of people essential NPC's died along the way (I made sure they do not break any interesting questlines) and I actually started the Dawnguard questline. I gotta say it isn't as bad boring as people say it is. Interesting turn outs so far.

 

What I'm basically saying is to enjoy the game on your go. If you have to run mods to alter some stuff, do it. I really, really enjoy doing my own things and let my character decide how to treat the other person. If he or she is rude or disrespectful while seeing that I'm obviously not friendly then they'll get what they deserve. It's also very interesting to not reload the game when something went wrong - like a specific NPC died or you failed a quest.

[Veladarius]

Unfortunately there is little variation in the dialogue for npc's. I think with as bad as they screwed up the CK and game engine they spent too much time trying to figure out how to do anything and was not able to finish a lot of things. There is a lot of potential in the game but, sadly, they made use of little of it.

[Kpnut]

I guess that's why we players are defined as 'adventures' in the game.  We are the schmucks NPCs get to do their dirty work for them.  It is our gaming lot in life to be suckers but it's not so bad.  After my little run to get the claw back I went through and collected everything from everyone I had killed and after selling it I came up with about 500 gold pieces.  Not bad for about 14 game scale hours of work.  There's that, and if I had finished the quest to the end I'd have the option to bang his sister.

Actually I use the term muderhobo (a phrase I nicked from /tg/) to describe my characters (even if the hobo part isn't all that accurate and the murder part is thwarted by NPCs being essential) still I might go do that quest for shits and giggles (not actually started the main story on any of my characters yet.)

[Kendo 2]

Unfortunately there is little variation in the dialogue for npc's. I think with as bad as they screwed up the CK and game engine they spent too much time trying to figure out how to do anything and was not able to finish a lot of things. There is a lot of potential in the game but, sadly, they made use of little of it.

I haven't seen anything in vanilla Skyrim that just blows me away as far as mechanics, animations or performance.  The story lines are weak too.  IMO, Skyrim needed another full year of development and general clean up.  Pretty sure the catchy 11/11/11 release date was determined by suits crunching the pre-Christmas season market numbers in an attempt beat other game companies.  Whatever happened in reality, we the players are the ones who paid the price, since Bethesda certainly didn't.  It is almost like they will get GOTY by default when they have a new release, no matter how buggy or unfinished it is.

 

Hopefully the next Beth release will be better, but they rarely are.  Just more of the same in a different setting.