4601

Just the very beginning of the Dark Brotherhood crumb trail

Go to Windhelm and follow up on the people muttering about some child attempting the Black Sacrament.

In other news:

I hope we get some nice, meaty companion quest DLC. That’d be a decent DLC angle, being able to flesh out and go adventuring with our favorite companions.

4602

Same! 35 hours in, started over with a new character and am starting to break open the main quest a little bit. Absolutely fantastic game!

4603

Did you have to say that? That’s just another reason for me to not start playing just yet…

4604

So companions are, like, worth having in this game? Because in all of my hundred and twenty hours of Oblivion and all of my hundred and twenty hours of Fallout, I never bothered with one. I figured they’d just be ugly and constantly getting in the way. That dungeon I had to do with a buddy for the Companions was irritating enough by itself. I’m pretty sure I clocked whichever V guy was with me about as often with my whoopass stick as I did the zombies.

4605

They carry shit and they’re good sword/arrow sponges. They’re also good for keep strong creatures occupied while I run and leave them to their deaths (which doesn’t happen and they teleport back to me eventually). They get in the way sometimes but I figure it’s worth the trade off.

4606

I’m enjoying them. I’m playing on the highest difficulty, so having an ally to draw fire / dish out some damage is extremely useful (like, I wouldn’t be able to win some fights without one), ditto having an extra inventory to store stuff in. But they do have basic AI that gets stuck on slopes, walks into traps, and will ruin your attempts to sneak. Plus of course you can blast them with spells and kill them. I do like the feeling of not being totally alone, and some of the companions have neat snippets of dialogue they’ll say at certain things (like identifying caves or dwarven ruins, or gawking at an impressive sight), but those are repeated to distraction. It’s a mixed bag, but ultimately I enjoy having one with me. I would not call them a must-see feature, however.

4607

Brian - RPS just did a piece on his relationship with companions, and its bloody hilarious! And quite disturbing :-D

4608

They’re decent to have around in battle, but unfortunately they are not as fleshed out as the buddies you can recruit in Fallout NV or even Fallout 3. Once you secure their services, they are pretty much robots. There isn’t any development quest or anything like that.

4609

You mean you cant have some Dark Elf Man on Nord Man action?
Where is Bioware when you need them.

4610

Brilliant. The gate video is laugh out loud funny.

4611

I hired the mage in Riften as a companion and during one of our dungeon crawls he quipped “Do you have to take everything that’s not bolted in?” with audible contempt in his voice. I laughed. And yes, I do have to loot everything!

4612

I’ve had a few quip, “Lucky for you that was just sitting there for you to take, huh?”

Yes. Yes it is.

4613

There’s an explanation for the DB’s sorry state, if I remember right. Also, as a fair warning: even though you get 20,000 gold as a DB reward, that’s immediately followed by an optional quest to spend about 18,000. Then again, it’s optional, so I guess you can just ignore it.

4614

I’ve only had two companions (Lydia, who I accidentally nuked to shit with a fireball scroll), and Janessa, a Dunmer light-armored dual wielder I hired in some bar somewhere. Lydia was a bit too much of a goody-two shoes for my current character’s tastes (I’m currently playing a thief/assassin), but Janessa’s attitude better compliments my own for this character.

I think the companions are mostly great, because it’s fun to have another character to deck out in cool loot, and also because I play in first person and it’s cool watching her beat the crap out of people with the two magically imbued glass maces I’ve given her.

She it still a bit of a dip-shit though, always standing in my way when trying to go through doors, and setting off every pressure plate I’ve trained to avoid, but she’s fun to have a around (plus she complains, much, much less than Lydia when I turn her into a pack mule). Sometimes it’s a bit surprising when I just carelessly run through some tunnel, avoiding pressure plates (because of my perk for it), only to be impaled by a swinging tree truck right through the chest thanks to my companion’s fat feet, but for the most part I can avoid msot of the pitfalls in this regard.

What I find harder to swallow is that my companions are constantly aggroing monsters I’m stealthily avoiding. They can sneak as well as I, and will avoid detection as good as I on a normal day; but they’re constantly bumping into people/monsters, which generates aggro no matter how good you sneak, and then the jig is up.

While I do leave her behind in some instances, I try not to do it too much in dungeons or out in the field because I’ll either forget where I left her, or forget I left her at all until I get a message saying she’s tired of waiting and has left me (which is the only time I’ll reload in order to go get her, since she’s my pack mule and all).

I haven’t reloaded explicitly to save a dead companion yet, as I’m trying to keep consequences and deterrents in the game feeling somewhat substantial. Although I’ve found a few gold exploits (stealing and fencing a particular constantly-respawning item worth about 2000 gold, being one of them), I tend to avoid those for the same reasons.

4615

I think this year is going to teach me a lot about what I like in videogames. Skyrim is extremely dense with content, but you don’t get the same pacing and climax as a linear, cinematic game. You’re depending on emergent gameplay and your mood. You have to hope it all comes together into great personal stories over the course of a few hours.

Part of that is chance I think. Part of it is who you are as a gamer. I appreciate the RPS article today where the author geeked out about being sent to jail over and over in Oblivion. And the Lydia stories are cute. But I doubt that’s ever going to do it for me personally.

Fortunately I was overwhelmed with spectacular moments in hours 5-20 of this game as I discovered the new world. I’ve been cruising at a high level since then, enjoying quests and every dungeon, but it hasn’t reached the same heights. From squinting at spoilers I’m vaguely aware of parts of the game I haven’t seen that have the potential to be awesome. That’s what’s driving me forward right now.

I’m starting to think my favorite games combine openness with moments of climax: Deus Ex, STALKER, Fallout, etc. What’s exciting about Skyrim is how close they get to that within the existing open Bethesda style. They’ve come such a long way.

4616

It’s funny that everyone seems to get Lydia, even though you get a male housecarl for going to the Stormcloak city first. Did everyone just make for the Imperial city first?

4617

You get a housecarl in every city that you become a thane.

4618

It’s where the main quest takes you. It’s clearly supposed to be the first major city you encounter. I wasn’t even aware of Imperial vs. Stormcloak at that point.

4619

Both Hadvar the Imperial and Ralof the Stormcloak take you to their relatives in Riverwood; they in turn ask you to go to Whiterun to get some protection for the town. From there you’re shipped off on the Bleak Falls Barrow fetch quest and when you get back there’s a dragon attack and boom, you’re thane.

I imagine most people ran through that stuff first, thinking it was all kind of prologue-y.

4620

As others have said, you get Lydia as a huscarl for going to not only the the city you get sent to right after the prologue, it also happens to be the closest city, and one which can be seen in the distance with LOD turned up.