Bethesda did a good job at making Skyrim, the 5th game of The Elder Scrolls series. With so many good reviews plastered all over the Web, I won’t even bother making one. I guess all you need to know can be summed up in a handful of points
- the world is huge
- you can do a lot of stuff
- dragons, lots of em
- you can catch butterflies
Ya rly
These are also the reasons why I’m always raring to go back to the province and get my hands on Komo II (I can’t get a decent computer yet, saving up for the wedding+house). Unfortunately, I only go to Laguna every other week, and as we all know, gamer – games = sad. The only thing I will have for one and a half years in Manila is a laptop and DSL connection, so I have to make do with that.
To curb/fuel my love for this game, I’m planning to write a glorified play-through of my character as he explores the world of Skyrim. I already have a sneaky assassin type character that I’ve been playing for about 72+ hours, but I’m going to start from scratch again, since i played that character “normally”. Here’s the list of self-imposed challenges to make the game hardcore without sacrificing fun.
- Limited Fast Travel: The game allows players to “fast travel” to a previously discovered place anytime by opening the world map and clicking the destination. This will be restricted. However, fast travel via caravans are still allowed.
- Limited Saves: Quick saving is limited to “boss” encounters and upon entering an area, preventing me from save-scumming. In normal play, expect me to quicksave once every 10 seconds, so I’m basically immortal. With this restriction, I won’t have that sense of invulnerability. Since I don’t want to waste my progress, I won’t be imposing a “perma-death” rule (plus making a new character every time I die can get tiring even with the cool gameplay and graphics).
- No bug abuses or exploits: That means backstabbing essential NPCs to raise my skills is not allowed… same goes for the Oghma Infinium glitch, Artisan loop, and taking double quest rewards.
- No quest markers or in-game compass: If I want to find out where i’m supposed to go, I have to bring up the world map, not just follow a quest beacon a la Call of Duty.
- Waiting restricted to certain places: The game allows you to wait anywhere as long as there are no hostile creatures nearby, but staying in one place for 8 hours outdoors is less like Skyrim and more like David Blaine
- Time scale will be set to 4: Skyrim’s default game time is set to 20 minutes for every minute in real-time, which means 1 day in Skyrim will take just a little over an hour. I adjusted this to 4 minutes for every minute in real-time to improve realism without making it too tedious.
- Eating on a regular basis: It would be weird for someone to go without days of eating food, so the character has to eat something once every 4 hours (that’s every hour in real-time with the adjusted time scale)
I’m gonna be using some mods taken from Skyrimnexus, but most of these are just meant to enhance performance. The only mods that will affect gameplay in this playthrough are Thu’um Mic (a mod that lets you activate dragon shouts by speaking to a mic) and Valdosa’s Arrow Crafting and Item Meltdown (allows you to craft arrows and melt down gear to get raw materials).
I’ll be taking screenshots all the time while jotting down key events, then i’ll post the “chapters” here every week. If you’re not into Skyrim or computer games in general, dont worry; I’ll try to make this look like a novel instead of a play-through.
I’m begging for people to read this >_<’ pls enjoy.
