I’ve been fortunate enough to play some fantastic Xbox 360 games since I bought the console in October last year (I know, I’m very late to the party), having thoroughly enjoyed titles like Mass Effect 1 & 2, the Assassin’s Creed series and Portal 2. I’ve been spoiled for choice in the Awesome Games department, so I was even more excited to add The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to my collection after my lovely wife bought the game for me for Christmas.
Best Christmas present EVER, I thought. I couldn’t wait to get back home and absorb myself in the beautiful vistas I’d seen online, preparing to fight dragons and save the world, one swashbuckle at a time. For a while, Skyrim did more than meet my lofty expectations; I was thrust into landscapes I had dreamed about in games since The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (a game which hadn’t been as good as I expected it to be) where I was free to go and do whatever I wanted to do. As it happened, what I wanted to do was explore the world – I visited all sorts of random places on the map until I eventually found myself in Whiterun. I began The Companions questline, thinking it would be a fun diversion with a result that would hopefully pay off, and the quests seemed kind of interesting anyway. I breezed through the easier quests and returned to The Companions’ headquarters, Jorrvaskr, [SPOILER ALERT] to find a swathe of dead Companions thanks to The Silver Hand. What I did not expect was to be prevented from finishing the quest thanks to an epic bug which stops the character you need to speak to from advancing the questline for you. I was stuck, and all because I had one tiny little miscellaneous quest (‘Retrieve the helm of Windhelm’) unfulfilled in my journal. To say I was annoyed was to put it mildly; I thought about starting a new game with a new character but, pissed off as I was, I instead took the mature way out and refused to play the game.
This is the heart of the trouble with Skyrim: you could invest a ridiculous number of hours playing the game, only to come across one little obstacle that stops you in your tracks. It is an enormous virtual world that Bethesda has created, so I completely understand that spotting bugs can be an obscure and almost endless process, but for an ENTIRE SIDE-QUEST line (and quite a prominent side quest at that) to be broken by one tiny little open miscellaneous quest you have to be fairly unobservant. A quick internet search for the ‘Forever Mourning’ bug, as my experience has been dubbed by other players, shows that there are a great many people affected by this one issue. So why wasn’t this spotted during play testing for the game before it was released? I have yet to play another game (apart from Oblivion, natch) sporting this many playability issues on general release. Mass Effect 2 is a pretty big game, and I’ve experienced one single, solitary bug on a later mission – this bug fixed itself once I reloaded the game, so it was no big deal.
Whatever, I thought. I decided I’d wait for the latest patch to be released for the game and come back to it at a later date, which happened to be earlier this week. The bug I had resolved itself and I was able to complete the questline as expected – win. I was absorbed again, back in love with everything Skyrim has to offer; like a joyous reunion with an old flame, I came back again and again, trying out some new side quests this time.
Also like a reunion with a past loved one, I ignored the little things that used to annoy me for a while – when the game crashed, I put it down to too many hours spent on Netflix beforehand. When it took an inordinate length of time to load anything, I attributed it to the game cache, which I then dutifully cleared. These were minor inconveniences that I wasn’t going to let get in the way of what was otherwise a pretty seamless gaming experience. At least I was, until I came across another pothole in the road – another glitched questline, this time thanks to joining the Imperial army. Legate Rikke decided she didn’t really want to talk to me about halfway through the quests meaning that, despite my efforts to reunite the good people of Skyrim, I was doomed to failure. I’m stuck in limbo and, this time, it’ll be a bit longer until I go back.
I still love Skyrim – we’re good friends, and I’m sure we’ll see each other again occasionally, but until the wrinkles are emphatically ironed out I think it’ll be a good while until we meet again. What a shame.
As expected, given that we're now on episode 19 of 22, a few humongous developments in the whole 'can't sleep, Garuda'll eat me' arc are finally coming to fruition - Nadia's death was particularly gut-wrenching, and I just wanted to hug distraught Lauren until forever so she'd never have to cry again. It was so sad, and Nadia's last pleas to save herself and Lauren gave her character the noble end she deserved. What will be interesting now is how this changes her relationship with Bo; she's sure as hell not going to be able to forget that her beloved succubus killed the woman she loved and looked after for over 5 years, no matter the motive. Let's just hope the writers don't decide to make her go to that crazy insane place we saw 'Lauren' in for season 3...
