Skyrim -- they got me again

Just as I fell for the 2010 April Fool's announcement of Elder Scrolls V, so today I spent a happy half hour actually believing Peter Jackson was going to make a movie of Skyrim.

Annie, we all fall for those things from time to time.

Well, Skyrim got me again because I see that in my absence they put out $60 worth of new DLC. Ka-ching!

The Dawnguard DLC is great.

I'm playing the Dragonborn add-on now. It's very... sepia. And a bit buggy (lots of screen freezes). I'm playing the PS3 version, mind you.

Wow, lucky Hagatha still has all the lovely DLC to play!

I have all three DLCs and I've still barely touched the new material, despite having logged over 200 hours gameplay to reach level 67 - I've not even completed the main story line of the original game yet!

Skyrim's ability to just go on and on is amazing. And the flexibility in the gameplay too: my character started as a kind of battle mage (sword and flames), moved on to a vanilla fighter (daedric mace & shield), and is now a sneaky archer assassin!

Legendary skills for the win!

He's a renaissance man

I made it a mission to get to level 80 so I could fight the Ebony Warrior. When you beat him( he is tough ) you get his armour and weapons which are very good.

I've played a ridiculous 400 hours of Skyrim and have barely touched the main quest, never mind the DLC. I guess I'd better get back to it.

Um, I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I've put in 1,275 hours. I do love retirement!

Wow, Annie, that is amazing

Annie! Is that with just one character?

I'm at around 300 hours. I started up a new character, a Dark Elf battle mage, but at the moment I'm back with my beloved original character, an Imperial male warrior, who's simply gorjuss in Dragonplate armour (and happily married to sweet Farkas!).

I divorced my first hubby, the Blacksmith. Haven;t found another one yet. I really need to get back to it, but can't even remember the first thing about the plot...not that it really matters. The first time I played Morrowind I was level 40 or so before I even knew there WAS a main story line.

Thanks, L4L! BTW I lost my sweet little girl cat the other day and it made me think you and your pups.

Rushes: I put in about 600 hours with my first character, I think. Glad you and Farkas are happy together.

As for you, Hagatha, I will have you know the blacksmith is my husband and I have the wedding pictures to prove it. But for some reason, he keeps going off and marrying other people. I think he married Tracy several times.

Ahhhh Annie, hugs hugs and more hugs.

Thanks, L4L, I know you understand.

Annie, I didn't want him in the end, so you can have him back. A solid man, but dull. I want someone racier.

Thanks, Hagatha. He may be dull, and he could certainly use a bath, but he's all mine.

You gotta love a game where you can get married and divorced. That's right, ditch the old man for something new and exciting. Now that's what I call REAL role-playing.

And of course, at my age, I should really be playing a Khajit, which is Skyrimese for "old cougar."

Ahhhhh so that is why I made a Khajit

Over the weekend I decided it was time I knocked the main quest on the head ... so I did.

Now I've made a start on the Dawnguard quest lines.

However, I found out about a new fan-built DLC called Falskaar that's available from skyrim.nexusmods.com (if you like to use mods, you really should get an account there - the basic account is free - the mods there can be larger than the Steam Workshop ones because there's no file-size limit on nexusmods).

The Falskaar mod fits in so smoothly into the normal pattern of quest and dialogues that I didn't realise I'd triggered the start of it until I arrived in Falskaar - it's a new territory, not directly connected to Skyrim. It has it's own quest lines, but seems to use the existing resources of the game. The biggest difference I've seen so far is that there is actually more spoken content than in Skyrim.

So far so good.

Interesting. You could spend your whole life in there, couldn't you?

Wow, thanks for this info Gremlin. This mod is as good, if not better than a DLC that we have to pay for. It is so involved and works smoothly. This 19 year old really spent a lot of time and effort on this thing and it shows.

I'm am impressed with the whole mod and strongly recommend it to any Skyrim players out there.

I've been absorbed in Falskaar for several days now and all I can say is to repeat myself. Wow!

So I decided to give Skyrim another go because I haven't touched any of the expansions.

I started over with a new character since I finished the main story with my old character, plus the game was basically on easy mode at my level.

Playing a Breton this time and trying out being a mage, as I never usually go for magic in these games.

I thought I'd be bored maybe, but the game has already sucked me back in.

Two things stand out for me, how fun the game is and how glitchy it can be. I figured by this time they'd have most of that sorted out, but not so much.

I was getting sudden framerate drops out of the blue when everything was running smooth for like half an hour. I finally remembered to just turn AA off which was the culprit.

Also, Lydia just vanished into thin air and can't be found. Only way to fix this was to reload a past save.

I tried to get married and I find that is still a bit glitchy to get the ceremony to start. So I went outside of Riften to the stables to wait until the next day, at which point I was immediately jumped by bandits.

I took them out and apparently they were sent to "rough me up" because I had been stealing from the mage's guild. It's funny they weren't supposed to kill me, but teach me a lesson, but I killed them.

I for one admit to stealing plenty, but was never caught, so that makes it all the more interesting.

I ended up missing the marriage ceremony because of the fight and "broke her heart" so I guess that was my lesson for stealing.

Hahaha !! So one romance definitely called off then !!

Given your nickname, that outcome was quite predictable

Well to quote him "I lie, I cheat, I steal and I just don't get any respect".

I think I live in the worst neighbourhood in Skyrim though. Shor's Stone is a terrible place to live.

There's a dragon living up on the summit of the mountain above the village.

There's a fort full of bandits just down the road.

The mine is full of spiders.

Vampire's attacked the town.

The watch tower up the road for the village is filled with the dead bodies of the four guards and who knows what happened there.

The town has been attacked by a dragon on five different occasions so far.

The corpse of the black smith and a guard lie in front of my house (dragon victims).