Skyrim Journal 10 Hours In - I'm a wizard. You burn now!

It's been a week since Skyrim launched. Way too much stuff has being going on for me to play it anywhere near as much as I would like, but I have gotten in around 10 hours with the game by now. Of course, 10 hours of Skyrim is really just scraping the very outer layer of the near bottomless content pit that Skyrim offers.
It's kind of crazy, when you think about something like the Modern Warfare 3 campaign, which offers around 6-7 hours of gaming to complete. Skyrim is a juggernaut of a game that promises to munch down all my free time with some with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

My first week with Skyrim has really just been about getting my bearings in this overwhelming world. I've done a little bit of the main story line, but I was quickly distracted by a deluge of side quests that saw me finding dead bodies and listening to the tales of old crones.

The initial city of Whiterun can keep you occupied for hours. There's just so much to do!

When playing these big RPG games I normally tend to focus on just the main quest line and supplement a little with side quests. It's not that I hate doing side quests, but I really enjoy following a story, and most often I'll get sucked into the main storyline of a game and find myself blasting through it and missing a lot of content. But with Skyrim I feel more compelled to do other things than just the main quest. Perhaps it is because Skyrim feels so much like a real world, and you can't help exploring a lot and wanting to peak just around the next corner in case there is something cool there.


I've made my character into a real straight up combat focused mage. I'm going with Destruction spells as my main way of dealing damage, loading up the same spell in each hand and dual casting for flaming or lightning infused carnage. This has been working out alright for me, though I do find that I am fairly squishy (guess my robes needs some steel reinforcement) and I can't take much of a beating at all. Thankfully I picked up a warrior companion pretty early on, and she does a good job of tanking most enemies while I stand on the side, shooting flames from the palms of my hand and yelling "BUUUURN! BUUUUUUUURN! AHAHAHA!"... But enough about my mental issues.

I put this magic murder method into good use in the first random dragon encounter I had in the game. I managed to capture it on video, and for your viewing pleasure I give you the newbie dragon slaying experience:

Alright, so it's not actually all that impressive to look at. And to be honest, it's maybe not even that impressive to play either. I know that Bethesda has put a lot of effort into making fighting dragons an epic experience, and they are very impressive to look at, with their swooping and flapping and the fires that BUUURN!
But actually fighting them feels a bit awkward. And they're not terribly difficult to kill either. I realize that Bethesda wanted you to go straight into the dragon killing, so you'll be fighting dragons even at low level, but it does make them seem a whole lot less epic, when I'm more afraid of fighting a bear than I am of fighting a frigging 50 feet long fire breathing scaled behemoth.

Anyhow. I quickly decided that my magical skills were of such awesome power that I should totally join up with the local Skyrim wizard club AKA the College of Winterhold. Opening my map and checking out where I needed to go was a real "holy shit!" moment, as it was out in the middle of nowhere, halfway across the map from me.
Suitably depressed, I returned to doing some local side quests, but I gradually worked my way closer to Winterhold. At least you can always fast travel back to a explored location, so all this foot slogging will only have to be done once. Oh, by the way, it was during these travels on the main map that I made an unpleasant discovery. Skyrim does not save your game automatically when you're just running around and not entering or exiting anywhere. So when I found my flower picking stroll through the world unexpectedly cut short by a fortress full of mages (curiosity killed the cat. Also the n00b mage), I had to reload a save that took me all the way back to the town I had started my journey from. Derp! Do not pass start. Do not collect $200.

But all my woes were forgotten when I finally made it to Winterhold and joined the cool wizards club. I've started down the quest path and I'm already caught up in a web of political intrigue, ancient magical relics and an old mage order that has come out of its self imposed isolation.

Here I am chilling out in Winterhold. Notice my warrior companion to the right *totally* checking me out..

I'm having a lot of fun with Skyrim already. My only real complaint so far, apart from the dragon fighting that I mentioned earlier, is that I have encountered quite a number of crashes on my PC so far. Completely unannounced and random crashes that throws me back to the desktop without a care for all my unsaved progress. This has made me a bit paranoid about constantly saving, so hopefully it wont be too long before we see a patch from Bethesda.

I'll be back with more personal tales from the snow filled land of Skyrim. So stay tuned!



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