Skyrim – Extra shorts

Some extra thoughts from more Skyrim playing:

I find it very weird that companions don’t care at all if you beat lots of innocent people to death, steal their stuff, and maybe eat their dead bodies?

Bethesda are obsessed with cannibalism.

Non-player characters really love to run in the way of my fire spell…thus becoming agro…and killing me.

Also, you know what would be nice? Quest rewards being an item OR some money…cause all these staffs – with spells on them that I can already do? Getting sold.

And on that note…if a seller has spell books it should really indicate if I already know a spell, again so I don’t have to fight through menus. Obviously this doesn’t matter for picking them up – you can sell them.

And another thing…Why the irritating money limit in each shop? If you can press select and wait for them to get the exact amount of money back anyway (which is no less unrealistic) why bother with the limit?

And finally…if you do play they game – don’t talk to the Jarl in Whiterun. As soon as you do you activate the ENDLESS dragons…but if you avoid it (a la Oblivion getting the Horse and supplies from Jauffre’s Chapel, making sure to ignore the main quest from then on)…and do all the rest of the game instead…you don’t get random dragon encounters at level five…

Also these ENDLESS (or at least seemingly endless) encounters would be much more impressive if they weren’t…well…endless. I’ve killed three dragons outside of the College of Magic alone and the town is covered in their dragon skeletons. I don’t see why you couldn’t have had one in Whiterun, and then the next one being with the Lady who owns the Inn in Riverwood when you find it’s grave – then they wouldn’t have gotten so old so quickly.

While the Alchemy system is much improved the menu’s are actually really annoying, and lacking much needed features. Like how about a ‘Compare to my current’ button to compare if this…sword, for example…is better than the one I’m using (rather than me having to use more of the bad menu to check slowly). How about a better quick select menu.

That being said…there is a lot going in it’s favour. It’s huge and there is a lot to do (though sometimes it feels a little tedious doing one long quest that involves running from A to B to be told to do another one). Now that all the dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon stuff is out of the way the other extra, main, and side stories are pretty interesting. It plays alright and it is pretty, – with swamps and snowy mountains, ice bergs that are huge underwater, really, really pretty night sky’s – lots of lovely different regions blending from one to the other. It’s good at showing and not telling with it’s story and visuals.

I’m hoping (though neither I nor Peter are that far in the game anyway) that there is DLC, even if it doesn’t end up being what people are hoping for, what with Morrowind and Cyrodiil being distinctly visible on the edges of the explorable map.