Yeah, totally. Honestly, I should have explained this better in the video. Typically, I played stealth, changing up per run between illusion, conjuration, one-handed, archery, or some mix of any of these. I'd also put more focus on doing faction quests and getting faction gear, like the Dark Brotherhood or Nightinggale sets, so no need to craft my own stuff. And because I was either one-shotting things with all the stealth damage bonuses, even playing on Expert or higher, or using things like Frenzy, I never felt short on damage, so I didn't worry to much about smithing upgrades. And because my damage would always work pretty well, I never worried about getting new shouts. I honestly find them pretty drab in general; for the games main snowflake mechanic, I find the shouts pretty underwhelming in a general playthrough. Also, I'd pretty much just loot and clear through dungeons and stop back in to town to sell off things to the shops there. My basic gameplan there was a 1:20 weight:value ratio, so I was only really looting things with good value. This is pretty effective, and it meant that I never did anything like Alchemy for money, because shops only have 1.5-2k gold at any given time, so having 100k in potions would have been a real ball ache to deal with selling. Enchanting is pretty common for me, like I said, I missed it a bit in this style of gameplay, but I typically just threw relevant enchantments on any gear that wasn't faction stuff, or eventually replaced it with faction stuff. Again, I know you can break the game with enchanting, but I never felt the need to, so I never really did. And I don't typically care about enchantments for weapons; I don't enjoy the micromanaging that comes with the charges, and, again, I never really needed the extra damage anyways. As for like, actual gameplay? I'd just do whatever felt fun. Sometimes that was just doing Dawnguard and then dropping that playthrough, maybe I could come back later and do Thieves Guild, I dunno. Skyrim has never been a game where I felt particularly pressed to do any given thing, so I'd pretty much just bop around and do whatever felt like it would be a good time.
Someone did a video on “Why did *everyone* make a stealth archer?” and concluded that essentially the whole game rewards that behavior. Not actually literally everyone, but most people did it at some point or another.
I did decide to include a mod where the shops gained money proportional to the amount you use them. Basically a minor buff to money-on-hand because of your economic boosting.
Agree. Alchemy, Smithing and Enchanting were core skills to me. So much of this video is discovering things, that on first playthrough of initial release, were what made the game so great originally for me.
Errr make that thousands .... 1.8k hrs in Oldrim since 2011 & 1.6k hrs in Skyrim SE Then again I'm a PC gamer & modding gives the game longevity. Console players however may be a different story entirely.
my first playthrough lasted 300 hours. I played a sneak thief orc assassin named Gwar (did not know about the band when I named him lolol) and he just blundered through the game. it is still my fondest memories of this game
I forget who said it but a major game dev once said, “Players will optimize the fun out of their own experience.” And I think that explains a lot about what you say in this video.
I don't think this fully applies because it is still the job of game designers to try to make the most fun way to play the one that people gravitate towards naturally. Skyrim is a game where even casual noobs will play in the least interesting way because it does an abysmal job guiding you to a fun experience. And this still doesn't fix the bad writing and quest experience (hard to salvage when you can make a total of zero real choices in the game's story). It just makes the exploring part better. Which, is a lot. But it's not a silver bullet to make Skyrim as a whole good.
That saying is usually accompanied with "It's the developer's job to protect players from themselves". Now I don't think it can fully be done with Skyrim, since its design goal is to be an RPG that presents you with a bunch of tools to help you realize your vision of your character. Imbalance is inevitable in a game like this, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
@@swan-cloud Orthogonal design is the solution to this. This basically means giving the player varying options that do different things or are mechanically different to achieve the same goals, instead of direct upgrades to previous choices. Skyrim does this in numerous ways. The smallest and most obvious example of this is the melee weapon types: Swords swing fast and deal low damage, Axes are middle speed and middle damage, and Maces are low speed and high damage. But Skyrim does this with nearly everything in it's design.
I also like mining. I do not like leveling the smithing which has been made way too fricking tedious and slow even with exploits so I just console command the hell out of it, but I do like going around the world finding ore to build the things that I like.
I actively get transmutation, mine iron, and morph it into gold by waiting an hour instantly after casting the spell to keep all my magic up, and then I make a bunch of gold jewelry and hit level 100 smithing
I have always played Skyrim as a hoarding Dovakiin, so, I always interacted with the alchemy systems, the mining systems, the enchanter and College of Winterhold Forge. Not because I had to, because because they were available, I had the components and I was always money-poor, because of said hoarding It never really occurred to me that people wouldn't interact with those systems because to me, they were a large part of the game
Exactly what i was coming to say. Crazy that for someone else putting the necessity and limitations on certain systems totally changes their perception and gameplay experience
I always did this as well, but kind of only half way. In other words, I would hoard every ingredient I found to test with alchemy, I'd mine every ore I found for smithing, disenchant every new enchanted item I found, etc. but I didn't actually use the products of the systems much. I never focused on enchanting, or potions. Smithing, admittedly, was different, and I did always make my own armor and weapons. But even magic and shouts, I've never properly engaged with. The most I've ever used magic is to heal myself, and a few times casting some destruction spells to see what they do. I also never actually really bought things from vendors, except spell tomes (for spells that I would never use). Basically, I hoarded everything, and used almost nothing. I used to spend hours hauling every piece of valuable gear from every dungeon I cleared just to sell it for money I never used. Walking to and from fast travel locations while over encumbered was a regular experience for me.
Same, I would hoard ingredients that i causally pick up through out and then once and a while spam potion creating. Keep the basic health, stamina and magika potions and sell the rest. I agree with him in the micromanaging being annoying so I found away that alchemy suited me easily
I agree, once I forced myself to use certain aspects I had a lot more fun. Enchanting by itself is underwhelming, but enchanting coupled with alchemy to boost it creates powerful enchantments that enhance other gameplay. Reducing casting cost made mage builds insane.
Hardly. Skyrims incentives the player towards one or two play styles unless you purposefully try to make the game inefficient via challenge runs. Alchemy is a shit, boring system, forging is a shit boring system, enchantment is tedious garbage. It's not fun unless you try to go against the core of the game because the game is badly made.
@@JenIsHungry Dude, enchanting alchemy and smithing are how you get the most broken strong stuff in the game, even without any exploits. Once you find a single imp stool, mira tapinalla, and canis root, then plant them, the game goes on easy mode, lingering damage paralysis poisons. Wheat and blue flowers get health potions stronger than the strongest restoration before alchemy level 60. Enchanting is insanely strong, and putting all 3 skills together to make the best gear is great. Crafting that kind of gear is what enables you to make any playstyle you want viable. Stealth, full mage, battle mage, pacifist, summoner, a mix of all of them, etc.
@adamushu except broken does not equal run. Alchemy enchanting loops letting you 1 shot dragons with an iron dagger does not make the game more interesting.
I keep telling people "efficiency is bad for things you care about," and this is an excellent example. Everything you did was fantastically inefficient, which is exactly what you SHOULD be doing when you are trying to have fun. Why would you want to have your fun as fast as possible, instead of making it last as long as you could? That's just dumb.
Well see, some people don't play games and make videos for a living, meaning their free time available for gaming can be severely limited. It can really be a matter of doing things efficiently in order to make progress, or just not playing that particular game at all. Not to mention that min-maxing can be fun in it's own right, in a sort of "making the most efficient factorio world" kind of way.
@@theKashConnoisseur And no matter why you are choosing to be efficient, the efficiency is bad for things you care about. There are things that matter, and that you would like, which are fundamentally incompatible with the inefficiency. When you choose efficiency, you are choosing to reduce or remove those things from your experience. Sometimes that makes the entire experience pointless, because what you WANTED from it was one of those things.
@@cdarklock SO you're saying it's better to just not play at all vs playing the game efficiently, all other things being equal? Interesting, a logical mind would think that not playing would get in the way of enjoying the game more than playing it efficiently...
I forget who said it but it goes something like this "Engineering the Fun out of the game." That point when you play more than you did before but it doesn't feel fun any more because it isn't the fun parts, it's the hyper-efficient singular boss fight for the one thing you need for your helm's final gem slot.
@@trucid2 but if he wanted to be so overpowered then shouts would've helped, not to mention all the other uses, like how some things can't be found without whirlwind sprint, or using become ethereal to jump off high places, using kyne's piece to send all the objects in the room flying without getting in trouble, bend will on dragons for rides, slow time to catch up to fleeing enemies, they're just so useful so why would you deny yourself the magic that makes you special? We are Ysmir, the dragon of the north. Su'um ahrk morah.
I barely used shouts either, because I like to play these kinds of games by just wandering around and doing whatever, and finding random words here and there never really came together as something useful or interesting. In several hundred hours, I think I visited the Greybeards once. After that, I was like "well I'm never walking up this fucking mountain again"
@@trucid2 modding is what you make it, and most mods aren't meant to make you OP, just to customize your experience. The creator of Ordinator (the perk overhaul he mentioned in the beginning) for example has also created a mod that overhauls/adds onto the existing shout system. Basically you meditate on the words you already know and find new ways to combine them which unlocks new shouts. So I decided I would make one of my characters take her role as Dragonborn very seriously, and that playthrough I basically stopped using regular magic altogether because the shouts gave me all the magic I needed.
Oh man this was so good. Each time I type something out you end up talking about it! 10:00 - Regarding the role of enchanting in this ruleset. There's a fantastic video essay on Old School Runescape titled "Runescape is awesome, and here's why" by a creator named Marstead in which they talk about "Breakthroughs" in Old School Runescape. Completing a quest which gives you a new shortcut, access to a weapon type, a new recipe etc. etc. - Runescape is chock full of "Holy crap, this changes everything for me" moments which in my opinion is the bread and butter of Runescape's design. The aim of this ruleset was to try and do our best with what is a pretty "meh" reward system in vanilla and give a playthrough more "holy crap FINALLY" moments. You're right though! If I remember properly, the act of adding a new enchantment to my repertoire was more exciting than most of the enchantments were in practice. What I truly found rewarding was the gold because on survival mode, curing a disease costs 100 gold at an altar. Paying rent at the inn starts to add up and travelling without carriages can be a death sentence early if a sabre cat or bear caught me off guard. To the point you make throughout this video, it's still so funny to me how a few small tweaks to the perceived values of items and rewards can entirely change the feeling of a game when you play it. Bethesda spends an abhorrent amount of time littering their worlds with items that are useless on an average playthrough. One of my favorite things to do is find ways that float more niche items and mechanics to the top of the pool so that they can have their time in the "Holy shit this changes everything" zone. Side note: Love the use of CFPAO...I need that mordhau power attack animation in my game Side Side Note: Nobody tell this guy about Anniversary Edition or Goldenhills Plantation it will ruin everything for him
Hot damn, what a dream. Believe it or not, I'm a massive fan of your work, and have been for a while. It's fun to see how much the runs differed between us, even with the same basic foundation; I didn't mention it, but I took alters off the table for curing diseases, but I did make the call to allow cures from wandering Vigilantes of Stendarr. It's a mod thing, so I didn't want to bring it up in a video specifically talking about how cool the base game can be, but that mordhau animation single handedly changed the way my brain thinks about the melee combat in Skyrim. CFPAO is a godsend. All that said, you're a real inspiration, and this has been a really validating thing for me to read. Thanks for laying down the groundwork for this thing that I've had so much fun with.
@@ThaneBishopthanks for the kind words. This was one of my favorite video essays in a while. It does a better job of explaining why I love challenge runs than I can!
Hi there, sorry to interrupt. How do I find you on Twitch? Thane Bishop was a no at least in my search. I like how you tacle deeper feelings of my favorite game so count me in :D. I always look for a way to make Skyrim a bit more engaging and challenging so this is so recognizable. I love mods but not the ones which make it more easy. Graphics, sounds, music, ambiance, clutter, quest expansions and more perks ands thats enough for me
My friend... you have discovered something amazing. You have discovered, wait for it.....Roleplay. Welcome. We're so glad you are here. Know that this can seep into literally everything. I genuinely am happy for you. Some of the funnest times in my gaming history is when I took a step back and truly immersed myself in the game as if I was my character.
I really can't figure out what he was doing in all his other playthroughs. Skyrim's one and only good quality is that it allows you to do a facsimile of almost any activity. It's only good as a roleplaying game. Through all the elder scrolls I've played the main resource I was managing was my character's decisions. Power is at your fingertips, but is the moral price always worth it?
((hugs)) right? like, hon, it's on the box. You're doing the thing we were - ostensibly - meant to do. I'm glad, and welcome to the club, but like... what did you think it was before?
@@iivin4233 I wonder if these are the peopel that talk abotu how much of a big deal it is that the main story is weak. like, yeah, it is. sure. but my herb merchant isn't even the dragonborn. she and her tamed wolf that protects her from highwaymen haven't even heard of shouts. what's the problem?
"Didn't use alchemy..." -you definitely owe vannila an apology "Didn't use shouts..." -Were you even playing Skyrim at that point?😅 - seriously though, this is crazy to me, even if t just use shouts to push people off of or jump off of cliffs myself i rarely just decide not to use them entirely unless i am playing with dragons locked off.
@@Hell_O7 that wasn't the way he said it, he said it like he rarely if ever used Fus... I've had janked combat skill runs where my pedestrian ass was basically only able to kill with that shout... It was how I found Sabre cats seem to resist fall damage.
Im building quest rep before completing the bleak falls barrow quest - which unlocks the first shout and no dragon attacks.😅 I'll be thane of several places before I ever fight a dragon😎
It's bizarre listening to you talk about how you "normally" do things. You're talking about all these systems you never mess with, and are finally experiencing for the first time. All of them are the core things that keep pulling me back to the game, even now, nearly thirteen years after I played it on release day...
It's cool that the game has all these systems but if most of them never even matter in gameplay then what's the point in engaging with them? Sure, I suppose engaging with them could be the point on its own but at that point why not just play a game that actually focuses on these specific systems? And that's really the problem with many Bethesda games, they try to do everything so they end up not being particularly good at any one thing but rather average or below average in a lot.
@@amysteriousviewer3772 my view is that they do enough of it well enough to be engaging for anyone interested in pursuing a given interest. Alchemy may be better in other games, but it's good enough here to be fun for anyone that wants to try it. Same with most of the game's systems. Elder Scrolls wouldn't feel the same without any one of these systems. Heck, they removed enchanting as a skill for one game and enough people were annoyed that they brought it back. I love the variety, even if it means that certain areas aren't as good as they could otherwise be. It'd be nice if they got the variety AND the depth, don't get me wrong, but this is better than leaving things out.
@@amysteriousviewer3772 but most of those systems do matter and just because others don’t use them doesn’t mean they’re not useful. There are systems in Elden Ring and Baldurs Gate 3 that you can completely ignore and still beat the game. I’d also mention the guy said he didn’t use those systems because mods made him not realize it, which came years later.
@@tzmedia5345 Yeah, i can understand that. I think my main issue with Skyrim is that the enemies are so easy and braindead that finding creative ways to deal with them isn't really all that rewarding to me.
When I first played Skyrim I had never played anything like it so I naturally wanted to interact with all the systems until someone told me that it was super inefficient level wise and ruined all my fun
That's because while you're learning how to pick locks, the draugr are training. While you're studying restoration, the draugr are training. While you're taking a course in smithing, the draugr are training...
[I started writing what I thought would be a short comment about how I dislike that attitude, especially in Elder Scrolls games, and wound up with over 500 words so what follows is a bit more of a rant than I originally intended] yeah I fucking hate that attitude, it's the same shit as in Oblivion and Morrowind with trying to maximize ability score gains by very carefully leveling skills. While there's some truth to the theory (like, you probably shouldn't make acrobatics or athletics major/minor skills bc they *will* over-level you), I played both without focusing on max efficiency and it was unironically way more fun. That's why, while I listen to it probably once a year bc it's great background noise while I'm at work, I strongly disagree with PatricianTV's assessment of the leveling/difficulty system in his Oblivion retrospective, and was even more frustrated that he criticised Starfield for being "worse" in that regard. You don't need to hyper-efficiently level everything to have the most fun in these games, on the contrary, the feeling that you have to becomes a burden on an otherwise fun experience with plenty of other ways to maximize your power, like custom spell crafting. While I get that being too underpowered can be frustrating, and too overpowered boring, Oblivion has a full slider for difficulty, and Skyrim 6 different options (plus the new survival mode in AE), which are there specifically to help the player tune the game to their enjoyment. The idea that locking in a difficulty for an entire playthrough is somehow necessary or more "honorable" or legit is actually a toxic mindset that causes players to handicap their own fun. Personally, I think Skyrim handles this best because if you do over-level, even if you don't want to adjust difficulty, completing that dungeon that's now really tough bc higher level enemies are spawning will usually reward you with at least one or two pieces of significantly better loot, meaning you can catch back up to the curve pretty easily, and as the player you feel even more like you earned that better gear. These are huge games, and not every quest or dungeon, or even encounter *within* a dungeon, is going to be on the same playing field difficulty-wise, even if you control for difficulty setting, player level, main story progress, etc. The other day, I had to turn down the difficulty a notch for the skeleton dragon fight in Labyrinthian because even with the Atronach Stone, Chrysamere (CC weapon that gives 10% absorb magic), resist frost gear, and a companion with summons, the stamina drain and slowed movement from the 5 skeleton mages and dragon were just too frustrating to be fun. Once lowered, it was still a challenge, but also still rewarding to complete, and I bumped the difficulty back up afterwards, finding even the Dragon Priest fight at the end of the dungeon to be way less frustrating. You could argue that this is poor game balance or design, and maybe there's some truth to that, but with a game this size, not everything is going to be balanced perfectly for every player, so they have to be able to take things into their own hands and understand what makes things fun or frustrating or boring *for them*, and make adjustments accordingly. Even games generally regarded as well-balanced, like those from FromSoft, still occasionally run into these issues, and in Elden Ring, they combat this by making it so there are variyingly difficult encounters even within close proximity to each other, so you can always leave, level up and/or find new gear, and come back when the challenge will be less frustrating.
I'm convinced at this point that people who complain about level scaling in Skyrim has never played it, or they played it 10+ years ago and has since interacted with it solely through terrible memes online. Enemies in Skyrim has a cap where they can scale up to, different depending on the type of enemy. The mob draugrs can't scale their level to as high as the boss draugrs, and those two sub groups can be split down even further. For example, the boss draugr of an earlier dungeon can never scale past level 30. There are no level 50 wolves or mud crabs, yet you can still see them everywhere, even at level 80. THIS IS NOT OBLIVION, PEOPLE!
@@resm-oe9ji I played oblivion the same way where I just picked the skills I wanted to use and leveled up normally until someone explained that if you pick skills you don’t use and rarely level up, the enemies will stay low level. But the thing is, if you just want the game to be easier why not just turn down the difficulty? Text book “gamers will optimize the fun out of games”
@@resm-oe9jiI'm also pretty sure that not only do dungeons scale to a certain point, but the area that said dungeon can also lock it up to a point. Like all of the Reach starts at lvl 15 and goes upwards from there, and all dungeons in the Reach also start at lvl 15. Compared to most of Whiterun, that have dungeons that start at lvl 5 with a few exceptions like that Falmer cave north of Whiterun
My brother passed away in May. This video brought me to tears because Skyrim was always our favorite game growing up. It was hard to get through but it made me feel close to him, and I appreciate that. I’m gonna start a new Skyrim playthrough tomorrow in his honor. I hope we as a community never let this game die. Thanks for making this video.
Thanks for sharing a bit of your story. I'm sad to hear your brother is no longer with you, but I'm glad my words could help a little. I hope you enjoy the new playthrough
I'm sorry to hear of your loss. My father passed away in January, and I recently learned how to play chess because he loved the game. It is a good way to feel close to people that are gone now. Much love from NC ❤
With enchanting and smithing potion cheese being my primary route to Skyrim demigodhood, it's a bit shocking to hear of experienced players that have never seriously interacted with the mechanic.
It highlights why the self limitations are important. Once you have the understanding of the mechanics, if you mix them too much you become The Spiffing Britt and your character threatens to emerge from the game into reality and wreak havoc.
@@brent8491 what enticed me to the cheese, personally, is the game level-scaling with you. There comes a point where my Dragonborn should be able to storm into some random cave on a fetch quest and just mollywhop every single being that dares to look at him crosswise. Potion cheese grants me that power. My self-limitation is not using cheese when fighting important bosses. An example: Alduin is _supposed to be a tough fight,_ even for a daedric-favored Dragonborn. So one-shotting him with a billion damage fork doesn't fit my roleplay.
The feeling of starting a new Skyrim character, with an alternate start mod, with the ability to go and do anything by creating your own story. Is one of the best feelings in gaming.
This was crazy to hear as my standard pay through generally involves picking every flower, eating every edible and use alchemy to make all my gold, you get to the point where you walk up to the potion vendors, buy all the mats, turn them into pots that sell for more and repeat. I do a lap of all the towns every so often and it power levels fast af. I also use the transmute gold > rings method for BS leveling.
Seeing this after your stealth archer video, it confirms that you're definitely the type to optimize the fun out of a game. That's the vibe I got from that video, and I'm glad you're experiencing everything now, but it definitely felt like you were missing the fun of just hitting someone with a big hammer and exploring a dungeon just to see what you find, etc. just because it wasn't "optimal" before
There's more depth to this line of thinking than the thought-terminating cliche of "optimizing the fun out of a game". Theorycrafting a strong build or finding fast ways of powering up is both intrinsically and extrinsically rewarding. The game encourages this, as you can immediately feel the positive feedback in moment-to-moment gameplay. The drawback, though, is that one-shotting enemies gets boring after a while. Optimization in itself is fun, but you'll need a higher mountain to climb and Skyrim simply doesn't provide that. You know how to accomplish your objective faster, how to progress more with less time spent, and you can't simply erase that knowledge. The novelty of picking up herbs and mining provides enjoyment for a while, but at some point it becomes a chore and you might not get as much out of it as you're putting in. Why not simply loop vendors, you'd accomplish your objective faster with less tedium. You won't need to spend as much time interfacing with the systems, but at the same time your experience with them will be less meaningful. The key issue is self-regulation. After a decade of building characters it's near impossible to ignore the wealth of knowledge you have. Essentializing the issue as "optimizing the fun out of a game" ignores why it happens, and frames being "optimal" as a pejorative. The antidote to the staleness brought by prolonged optimal play might be conscious focus on role play, arbitrary rulesets or challenge runs or, but the fact of the matter is that optimization is rewarded directly, but punished indirectly.
Funny how sometimes the best experience a game can offer is when you refuse to engage with its core systems. Dishonored 2 with no powers is one of the best immersive sim experiences I've had. Your wits supplemented only by flesh and steel... And if you play right, they're all you'll need. With Skyrim, I did what I call the gladiator run. You live and die by your sword and shield. No other armor allowed. Pretty simple. See, damage reduction in Skyrim comes in the way of "set it and forget it" methods. Set your armour on and forget about, set Alteration Flesh spells on your hotkeys and forget to use them in the fight. The Block skill tree is different from these in one simple, crucial regard: it requires you to be active. You have to remember to block. And blocking and bashing take stamina, so you can't just turtle it out. With blocking, you need to mind your stamina and properly use the Block skills you unlock to survive combat. In other words, you need to be more present, more immersed. Made the combat more fun without a single mod installed for it. Restrictions never felt so liberating.
I should try that. I initially played a heavy armor two handed sword restoration playthrough, all perks to health - so a tank. Then I played stealth archer (lololol). And then alchemist/enchanter/magician But I should try unarmored at some point, it sounds fun
@@dodgyrhubarb457 💯 as a kid, dual-wielding was the coolest shit to me, but also made the combat a "mash L2/R2 while backpedaling until everything is dead" affair, something that's weirdly both difficult and boring, because you just take loads of damage, especially against crowds, but has very little variety in how fights are approached. My first breakthrough was when I started messing with enchanting and discovered the absorb health enchant-something that made the style more fun at lower levels, but with 100 enchanting and dragonbone weapons, makes you all but invincible. My second breakthrough was discovering just how fun and dynamic blocking, and especially bashing to interrupt attacks (and stagger if it was a power attack), made the combat. Now I'm 80-ish hours into a playthrough with no one-handed (or shields), and fighting with two-handed weapons is maybe the most fun I've had with the game since the days of playing at my friend's house, taking turns pickpocketing everyone's house keys to rob them in the middle of the night.
Doing a hardcore run of dishonored was one of the best experiences I ever had in gaming. No reloading saves, 1 life. I've gotten all the achievements for both games and getting ghost/clean hands was really just a trial of abusing quick saves. But actually playing it like I was the character, one life, no rewinding time. Made me appreciate how difficult the game can be and how hard it would truly be to avoid unnecessary killing in their situation. To add to your set and forget problem, ive always ran a mod called magic investiture or something like that. All those "flesh" spells instead of costing magicka and lasting a short duration reduce maximum magicka and act as a toggle.
I’ve tried several playthrus as “not-the-Dragonborn” or “reluctant Dragonborn”, which forces the player character to use the other mechanisms to survive and succeed.
Honestly, the Dragon Born part of Skyrim was the least interesting part for me. The civil war is a much better story, and IMO, if the Dragon Born aspect and shouts were removed from the game, I think it would be a better game. I'm on a current play through just like you. I used a mod to start in Solitude and it's been great.
@@sunyavadin IMO both Oblivion amd Skyrim totally shat the bed with their MQ. Both make it feel too immediately necessary and then trigger annoying interuptors in the form of the gates and dragons. I hate both and almost always never start the main quest lines now which really sucks. Morrowind was better in this regard and I hope they go back an learn from that. Tell me NOT to rush the MQ, and then trigger the interuptors much later in the quest line, much after I got invested in the story. Also it's not as disrupting to the rest of the game. Still played all 3 games for hundreds of hours but it's probably my biggest beef with the game.
Mods don't fix Skyrim. They... wait for it... modify it. Watching your vid was kinda interesting, because what you did is how I kinda always played the game, and a lot of people actually do. Not with a strict rule-set specifically, but treating it as the RPG it is. And yes, it is a RPG. It surely lacks a lot of mechanics you would now be inclined to throw in... and I would partially agree. Partially because what makes a RPG a RPG is not the game, but the player. Not the question of what the game offers you, but a question of how you approach the game. And if you spend time in the game doing stuff in the game, not relying on guides, best / optimal paths. And play in a way in "Would this make sense for my character". - Like the Healing Spell. If I play a pure warrior-type character with no affinity to magic, would that character use the healing spell? The spell is there and available, and as player you would be inclined to use it. But would the character you imagined even get the idea to use something like a healing spell?
The poblem with that is that many players enjoy doing the best they can to overcome a problem and try to leverage their full abilities against it. Limiting yourself in games can often feel like ignoring the obvious solution and trying you best to walk around in circles a bit before actually solving the problem. I prefer it if the games are actually designed to get players to use this stuff instead of just throwing everything in and saying "do what you want make your own fun" ... of course this requires a certain skill from the development team. Like it says in the video I can use buff potions to make myself stronger .. but why should I if the game is easily beaten without it. Would it not be great if using the potion actually made a difference in me beating something or not? This line of thinking is of course related to difficulty which is not necessarily my primary focus with this argument. My main point is some players will think "Hey by limiting myself I can actually use all this other stuff I never use" and get fun out of it and other players will think "man this situation would be so damn simple if I would just hit it with my sword (so to speak)" and get annoyed by purposefully ignoring the obvious answer in front of them. At the very least the devs should be aware what the obvious answer is (if there is one) an make sure its a least fun to do.
The reason Skyrim offers so many different ways to solve problems is precisely so you can leave out certain mechanics which do not match your chosen play through style. It requires self discipline to do this…sure it is easy to be the Battlemage Dovakiin…use everything available then say Skyrim is too easy and boring….this is how children play it, and why they get no satisfaction after just a few hours.
@@chidori0117 Skyrim allows you to open the console and spawn infinite money. Every time you play the game you are a google search away from having infinite wealth and power. I don't see any difference in choosing not to use the console commands and choosing not to min/max. Same thing with the difficulty scaling in the game. You could also choose to play the game on any difficulty, setting it on the easiest difficulty and then complaining about how easy the game is, why would anyone do that? So yes, do what you want and make your own fun, if fun to you is the easy or hard difficulty thats what this game is here for. Also I can assure you on higher difficulties, even as a stealth archer, a potion or poison can be the difference between life and death. Also skyrim introduces you to all these mechanics, you just chose not to use them or fully explore them. Again, not the designers fault but your own. You start skyrim two basic spells. If you choose never to read a spell book thats on you, don't pretend its the games fault you weren't interested in its magick system.
@@jasonhymes3382 I guess my point is I would just rather play a game that is designed to be fun for some and not others instead of a game that is designed for everybody to have fun as long as they make the fun themselves. Yes I do see a difference between cheating and using game mechanics. Its a fairly easy for me to distinguish external helps and obvious cheating/bug abusing from clearly intent gameplay mechanics. My point about Skyrim is that the "easy" solution you dont have to work for .. its given to you. You have to actively ignore many mechanics in order to make your own fun. (Or at least the video says so) This is different to when certain mechanics are hidden or to be discovered or achieved by some sort of feat that THEN make the game easier. At least for me because that entails a sense of discovery/learning/accomplishment instead of a sense of handicapping myself. My point is exactly what you said last the designers did not design a coherent experience they designed a sandbox and left it to the player to balance things out. I am not a game dev. Its like cooking I prefer a finely made meal instead of somebody handing me high quality ingriedients since I am no cook. I am not saying one is better than the other but that the intentional limiting of ones own abilities is something not all players enjoy and would prefer a more thought out challenge which still can have multiple solutions just that every solutions has its pros/cons and limitations.
@@chidori0117 I think there's a general misunderstanding in what games like Skyrim are for some people. First and foremost, it is a single-player action RPG. There is no need for optimization or efficient builds. Like, there's absolutely no requirement to go for these, except your own drive to do so. This also kinda reminds me of all the people who skip every dialogue in games and then complain about a lack of content and them being through the game too fast. I disagree on this being a developer skill issue, but an issue with appreciating a game for what it is by some players. Sure, you could have a stricter mechanical narrative that would force you a certain way. But ultimately, that would take more from the game than it would offer. These are open-world games, as close to sandbox as a story game can be. It IS a "make your own story" type of game and that puts the player in the position of being responsible for their own fun. Which is generally a thing though, the player is the one in charge of having fun or not. And for those who won't or can't take that step back, for those people there are other games and, in case of Skyrim, modifications. But this doesn't mean that base-game Skyrim is mechanically flawed by not forcing you to use certain mechanics, it basically just means that this game is not the game you think it should be and wasn't meant to be the game you think it should be. The choice, the responsibility of the choice is yours and yours alone. And that is what Skyrim and other games like it offer you. To choose how you have fun. And that is, I think, why Skyrim is still relevant. If it would have, those restrictions you mentioned, I doubt that it would be where it still is.
Additional Starts for Alternate Starts has a start where you can start in Meeko's shack with your family. Meeko starts out as your dog from the beginning and you can set out on your dragonborn adventures together from the start
Playing Skyrim and FO4 ss hardcore survival RPGs is the most fun i had with them. No fast travel, less carrying capacity, needing to eat, drink and sleep. Spent a lot more time planning out adventures, and just enjoying the game on a whole other level
Personally have enjoyed Skyrim survival ever since getting it on pc post-AE, even if cripples my beloved argonian warriors with the level of cold, but fallout’s has me modify its damages a little, since it functions as highest difficulty, unlike the toggle of Skyrim, so you you feel so frail to me personally if you don’t use power armor a bunch, with not enough damage from self imo to balance that, but yeah, really forces you to consider whether taking a piece of gear is worth it, depending on weight and such
Bro how did you never touch the alchemy station?? It’s so fun, once you start memorizing the effects of ingredients it changes the way you see the environments. Suddenly vast open areas become a treasure trove of potential tool components. See, this is why I’ve never been a minmaxxer, I will deliberately make things harder or more time consuming if it is more fun to do it that way. I don’t usually fast travel, if the quest line is engaging then I turn back from glitchy short cuts and go the developer intended way, and I will turn down better quality armor or weapons if there is an alternative I prefer the design of. It’s a game, you gotta make your own fun and play it the way you enjoy! Edit: the more I watch this video the more I realize I am maybe a freak. I love the smithing loop. I always make my own gear. I cannot fathom playing Skyrim without this part of the game….
I like making my own armor and enchanting it to my preferences and making my own potions. I can't imagine playing Skyrim with only what I happen to loot. I have Borderlands 2 if I feel like playing a looter shooter.
As someone who LOVES Skyrim, vanilla and modded, I found your video pretty cool and your enthusiasm through-out it is inspiring to say the least. IMO, all of Skyrim's vanilla systems are actually good, even Perk Trees I find useless on the long run like Lockpicking, Alchemy or Blacksmithing are actually good and meaningful. But I think the one system that works against the game sometimes, especially those 3 Perk Tress, is the Looting. You're able to loot any armor from dead NPCs, which gets better with higher levels along with many items or consumables. As a result, as you play and level up, you overlook the need to level Lockpicking since you get TONS of lockpicks, so you can afford to fail or make mistakes on Master or Expert locks all you want. You also amass a lot of potions, hence no need to master Alchemy, and you get constantly equipment the more you kill or quest, so no need to for Blackmithing either. The loot system is the one mechanic that, while good, also contradicts or hinders the whole design of Skyrim, especially on the long run. I don't like permadeath perosnally, but I can appreciate its value. I do like how Souls-like games handle the player dying though, and I think a more streamlined mechanic like that is a good compromise between saving-loading on death and Souls-like death. All-in-all, nice video! I had fun watching it.
The key to your role play game has always been playing a role. In western RPGs like Skyrim, you are given as little as possible as far as background and descriptors and it scrubs away so much that it feels jarring to be told "yes, this _is_ the plot of the game" at points. Our _choice_ is insanely important to this game. We have thousands of opportunities in Skyrim to really tweak the role that is being played until we've basically built an extension of Nirn in our head with what you can do to further play with that choice you made. Not all the mechanics are good, but they're all perfect for a handful of SPECIFIC roles that someone can choose. The game released in 11/11/11, and it's October 2024-- I'm calling that 13 years of perfecting Skyrim loop mechanically and emotionally. We're stuck in our ways by now. Maybe if we put it down for a couple months and picked it back up, we'd remember who is actually in charge of what role we're playing here and who decided the millions of other ones weren't worth it.
Me too lol. I loved mining and smithing and the alchemy 😂 all for the exact reasons he said too. Makes me wonder how many people don't interact with these types of gameplay mechanics and then say a game is shallow. Don't get me wrong, the classic Skyrim is wide but shallow still exists, but these gameplay mechanics add to the depth
@enochianbard9411 I considered Skyrim a sort of watering down of the popular CraftyBits mod for Oblivion. You know, back in the days when games came on... I am trying to remember if Oblivion was on DVDs or multiple CDs... There were some games around that time with two different releases because DVD drives in computers were not standard. ... I was actually helping my friend at his arcade today and a guy had dropped off some old computers - some Socket FM2, AM2, and AM 3+ boards.... My car is also just a few years from being a classic, as well... Anyway - people modded crafting into a game without crafting simply to go hack at different trees and boulders to build weapons they could just buy (or mod in to spawn somewhere random). I am kind of hoping... Somewhat against all odds, that Bethesda somehow scraped together the ability to combine the fallout 4 settlement system and a proper speech and charisma skill trees to allow you to form a war band in the next Elder Scrolls. It's asking too much, I imagine - but a guy can dream. Maybe I will have enough capital with my own business ventures in the coming years to start a studio and employ some good people to make what Bethesda couldn't - or at least make a good run at doing so.
Arena/Daggerfall/Morrowind said “master the deep mechanics or GTFO. Oblivion said “master the deep mechanics and the game will be easier.” Skyrim said “we have deeper mechanics, but you can just wander freely if you really want to.” Skyrim has a false shallowness that hooks noobs who know little, disappoints those who loved the older games, but will be surprisingly deep if you engage with it on its terms. It just won’t force you to do it
TIL I've done a mostly Iron Man playthrough of Skyrim (minus the looting restrictions, and not using starting spells) by preference and not as a challenge. Also, great video, of course. I always like it when UA-cam video essayists can admit when they are wrong and are able to back it up with points. It shows an ability to introspect and learn and grow.
Reminds me of when I tried an illusion only playthrough. Its really stupid but also fun. I had to run for at least 10 minutes just so a guard could kill a very stubborn bandit.
My favourite build is Illusion + Conjuration + Sneaking. First I make enemies fight each other, then if any survive I resurrect the dead to finish the living off. Meanwhile I hide in the shadows and watch the mayhem. It's a terrible build whenever 1 on 1 is required, it's terrible for defeating bosses and dragons, but who cares? It's so much fun.
This video inspired me to play Skyrim again for the first time in almost 10 years it's been some of the most fun I've had playing games in a long time. I usually can only play something for an hour and then get bored, but I've dropped 8 hours straight and I'm on my 12th character following the ruleset and every time I die, I just want to try again. I don't remember much from when I did play so everything feels fresh or is like a foggy nostalgic memory. So, thank you for making this and inspiring me to have probably my best gaming experience in the past couple years.
For my very first playthrough, I chose to play a character that would not cast spells. Shouts, enchantments, alchemy all on the table, but no magicka. Most of the play experience you're describing was my (unintentional) introduction to Skyrim. I also stopped using bows when it got too repetitive, and when I got the 15x damage for sneak attacking with daggers I was all-in melee stealth assassin. I cleared a fort one time like it was Assassin's Creed, undetected and one-shotting wveryone, and it remains the single most fun encounter I had playing Skyrim. I watched their routes, I prepped gear, shouts, poisons, and potions. And I cackled everytime the throat-slit kill animation played for a dagger sneak attack kill. Thank you for bringing these memories back. Now I'm off to reinstall Skyrim.
Most of my Skyrim runs I don't fast travel. I even ran a fast travel disabled mod. Having to walk everywhere gives you a better immersion into the Skyrim world.
I like this video very much, because its contents truly surprised me. I discovered Skyrim way late (2018) and started playing it on my Nintendo Switch (yes, you read that right), without mods and all that and today I have well over a 1000 hours .. I kind of played by myself since most of my friends don't really know or care for the game, but I never struggled with being entertained because I automatically did all of the things that you mentioned you were missing out on. I got married and chose a nice home that my spouse liked.. I used a lot of alchemy because I was already picking up everything I could find in terms of ingredients naturally.. so it just made sense to use them. Not even just for buffs and effects, but also for money. I sold nonsensical potions that made a lot of money! I used bound weapons to fill the soul gems I had found on my travels and slowly leveled enchanting on the side.. I always considered it roleplaying. And shouts?! Honestly I'm wondering what you have been doing in your games, if you haven't even used those.. just for the sake of collecting them all to see what they do, whether useful or not, is fun to me..😊
Thanks Todd Howard. But seriously, being along for this journey has been genuinely revolutionary in how I see this game, even though ive spent a good 50% arguing why Mjoll the Lioness is better than Aela of Companions fame. Absolutely delighted to see this video come out, especially knowing the fact that 30 minutes cannot possibly sum up the effing ODYSSEY the streams have taken us on. To many more years of Skyrim, cheers!
If it makes you feel better, I think I’ll be marrying Mjoll in this next run. I was going to marry that woman Morwen in the Skaal village, but there’s something to having your spouse follow you on adventures
Honestly man, it was such a blast having you guys along for the streams. It was a huge part of me deciding that going live should be a routine part of my work schedule going forward. I've got a lot more I want to do with Skyrim still, and then a lot more I want to do with other games still. Excited to see you around for it all.
@@ThaneBishop In one of your recent streams, you mentioned that you would potentially be interested in a highly-modded playthrough later on. I've been playing Gate of Sovngarde lately, and I get the feeling that you might not like it. I've found it too much for myself, and we seem to like similar mods in some aspects. Would you be interested in a curated mod list? I'm working on one for myself and I could make a version for you, with your feedback and even community input.
8:47 I really hoped you were gonna announce that Transmute was your gateway drug to learning about the benefits of cooking and the almighty ELSWEYR FONDUE.
@@reeven1721Jesus Christ, I've barely engaged with cooking in 12+ years of skyrim but maybe I'll start another playthrough as a mage chef. 25pts regen per sec is insane.
Always did a Khajiit, always ate fish... then I noticed I could cook Elsweyr fondue with what I was "borrowing" from people I have gone out of my way to make it since
This is adorable in seeing someone recognize the reasons why this matters. I just have such a huge aversion to death in games that I played like this, but others rarely seemed to get it.
Sounds like you don’t know how to play role play games. These people can play a role play game how they want. I have made 1000s of potions but outside of health potions I don’t know how many I’ve actually drank. Usually just sell them. Smithing is almost completely neglected for me.
The fact ur saying how someone is SUPPOSED TO play a game is just a dumb oppinion and i hope ur being sarcastic or rage baiting cuz if not. Your oppinion is stupid
@@DynamiteProdYeah, no. Just because people CAN play games however they want, doesn't mean they know how the game is SUPPOSED to be played. It's like watching a 5yo "play Minecraft" by flying around in creative mode pouring lava on cows. Sure they're having fun and engaging with SOME of the game's systems, but they're not really "playing Minecraft". They're playing WITH Minecraft - and that's the difference. People who "play RPGs" by only doing what's most effective/efficient are missing the point. They're playing WITH RPGs, not playing RPGs. RPGs are sandbox games that give you the tools to craft your own story - that's the point. That's why these games are made. And if a generation of gamers came into Skyrim not understanding what that point is, or that it even exists, they're going to experience it differently (and likely worse) than people that know better. Imagine thinking of Minecraft as "the game where you pour lava on cows". Maybe you'll see my point.
@@NoeLPZC This point your're making, that everyone in these comments seem to be making, is ridiculous. Do you not think there is a reason why a game like Skyrim needs a weird gameplay approach while other rpgs don't in order to be enjoyable? The gameplay systems in skyrim are just extremely imbalanced, and fixing it with gameplay limits is both unintuitive and immersion breaking. You expect people to just give up looting just so that crafting doesn't feel completely useless? And how does doing that make sense in the world? You can ignore all the stupidly abundant potions in vanilla skyrim if you want but you will never not know that they're there and that it's unimmersive. So why make yourself do these silly content creator challenges when you can literally just balance everything with mods so you can interact with ALL of the gameplay systems instead of ignoring half of them?
2,000 hours + in skyrim from release (mostly 2011-2016ish). Unmodded. Was my favorite game for a long time and is still in my top 5. I don't think it needs mods.
This reminds me of why I really loved Skyrim back in the day. If you invest in the world, in it's mechanics, it rewards you with a world to live in. I had forgotten, in the ensuing 13 years.
Making your own rules is one of the best things about this game. My favorite playthrough was one were I did, no crafting, no magic, no fast travel, turn off autosave so saves could only happen in safe places like inns and your homes, and no glitches/cheats to build up levels. Enchanted items, potions and scrolls could be used only if found. It really slowed down the game and it was probably the playthrough that I spent the most time and found/did the most things organically. My map was full. I only died a couple of times. I became very cautious because of the, sometimes, long periods of time between saves. It also forces you to carry fewer things so you won't become overburdened in a bad place. The only mods I had were some visual stuff and a wild life one. I had a few other rules but those were the big ones.
the fact that Skyrim is an action adventure game with RPG mechanics and not an RPG game with action adventure mechanics explains most gripes people who dislike it have with it imo
@@DedicatedAngler I don't think Morrowind or Oblivion were RPG's either. All of these games are adventure games, you don't make meaningful decisions in Morrowind or Oblivion, the only decisions you make are what factions you join and what quests you complete. But there is no ending slide where because you joined House Telvanni they became the most powerful great house. The questline is just over. Personally, I think that's fine, these have always been adventure games, games where I create my own story and my own fun, I join each faction and do each quest based on what my character would do. But these games have never been RPGs and I hope they never are, I want them to stay as exploration games. Give me my sandbox, fill it with weird shit and I'll have my fun.
@@Alex_Of_Astora You're absolutely right, Oblivion in my eyes was the nail in the coffin for the Elder Scrolls series as a RPG. I guess there's always going to be contention as to what makes an RPG vs a CRPG/ARGP/Whatever, but, the fact that combat uses dice rolls in Morrowind is a clear indicator of the series roots as a proper RPG.
@DedicatedAngler what kind of definition of rpg are you even using as it would remove far too many games from the early ages of video games to be a viable definition?
@@burningbronze7555 whys that a problem? I dont really understand your point. RPG statistic driven, character progression, looting all that good stuff. Games that encourage player agency and experimentation. Which of these games are RPG in your eyes? Zelda Diablo Skyrim Pro evolution soccer
ive always liked how self sufficient you can be with alchemy. most ingredients can be collected yourself and learning the best ways to do so is always fun. wading through sunken ships for barnacles, raiding people's houses for garlic, yelling the first word of either unrelenting force or clear skies at fish for salmon roe, mixing those three together to make the best alchemy power training potion in the game...its my favorite skill in the game
I always played like this, I even got a journal to write in character. Admitedly, you have to put a lot of effort into each gameplay to get anything done, but it is so worth it, it does feel like an experience. I'm happy to see other people enjoying the game like this too! There's a lot to do, and a lot to enjoy :)
I'm glad you had this experience of rediscovering the fun that can be found in raw Skyrim. I didn't really consider that people would play without using the crafting skills, especially given how they are arguably the strongest skills at high levels, but it's been enjoyable to listen to your story of finding value in them through a challenge run. I do like my fair share of mods and personally find some things a bit lacking for my taste, but Skyrim is a full game in it's own right and it's worth appreciating. I've always like the idea of alchemy in Skyrim, even on my first playthrough the moment I realised i could pick flowers and mushrooms and use them to craft stuff that immediately became a compulsion to gather everything off the side of the road as I go from place to place. The potion crafting has always been interesting to me, even when not looping it with enchantment to create god potions. I've tried doing playthroughs where alchemy's my main skill, but so much of Skyrim is combat, and because the closest it gets to providing a combat option is crafting poisons that you either reverse pickpocket if you can or just apply to weapons for some bonus damage it tended to end up playing not much different from other character for me. As you mentioned the game world grows with you, and if you spec hard into non-combat skills that aren't stealth early on, I find it gets a tad off-putting because I'm basically a level 1 character with Alchemy 50 in a level 10 world. Smithing is something I always considered an inevitability because even if you don't go hard on it tracking the ores, any gear you have can always be improved by simply having a sufficiently superior smithing skill. Unless you're going full mage with enchanted clothes and no weapons, any character setup will have something, from a dagger to full daedric armour, that can be improved with smithing, and enchantment ends up in a similar place since when you get a high enough enchanting skill you'll never find anything non-unique that can match you can make yourself. If anything the challenge for me is to not "optimise the fun out of the game" by limiting how much I allow myself to indulge in smithing/ enchanting.
It was one of the best sandbox exploration games I've ever played. Up there next to Subnautica. Edit: Also, Alchemy and Enchanting have always been powerful. It's my favorite way to play these games.
I left a comment on your original video about Skyrim talking about how playing the game in different ways can enhance your experience, and I'm so glad that you're giving it a try!!
One of the best experiences I had in Skyrim was a legendary and hardcore playthrough where I put every single point in stamina (I had about 3000 hours of playtime and thought leveling stamina as absolutely useless beforehand). Turned out it perfectly complemented my playstyle. I could sprint for ages, and traversed the map WAY quicker than I had ever expected. The added carryweight saved my hoarding gremlin ass sooo much running. Every combat encounter was like playing with fire because everything that was not a skeever could very well one shot me. And best of all, It made the obligatory stealth archer gameplay soo much more engaging, because if I was detected, I actually was in really REALLY big trouble for once.
Thank you so much for introducing me to this entire idea! I recently started a playthrough of Skyrim, where I am kinda roleplaying as best as I can, and I'm not rushing to all the good things that I could access. And I'm playing as a mage! Which means I have to be really careful about my health, as I haven't leveled that up at all! I took inspiration from you on not allowing myself to pick up potions from the world, so I'll need to craft them all myself, and I think I'll do the permadeath thing as well! I just have one oopsie daisy to make up for, which now has a very good punishment for that!
This video was a lot of fun. Heads-up, but you're still wrong about Skyrim. Crank the difficulty up to Legendary. Play with no rules, but respect your own time. Don't bum rush things, prepare for them and kill them efficiently. Player-made lingering poisons are busted. Fortify skill potions are insane. Smithing and Enchanting take a while to wind-up, but are incredible in the mid and end game. Staff of Storm Atronach from the Atronach Forge is both real work to get early and exceptionally rewarding. Muffle spells, the Impact perk, Potions of Invisibility, Vampirism, Lycanthropy are all killer. There is real scaling in Predator's Grace, Vampire Lords, the Lighting Storm spell is absolutely insane against dragons in particular. Explore the economy. There is a crazy economic engine unlocked by Sadri at the College of Winterhold. Grelka in Riften is also an unsung hero of the Skyrim training economy. If you like permadeath, Blackguard Armour introduces another great risk/reward like the Staff of Storm Atronach above. Mods are incredible, but you don't need them to have a tonne of fun in this game for a very long time.
3:58 same could be said about chicken. Sure you could raise, kill, and rotisserie cook your own chicken(s), but is it worth the time and effort when you can just… buy an already plucked, and cooked bird from the store? You can totally just get the ingredients for a health potion, but it’s just easier to get it from a store.
Love this video! I fell into deep love with Valheim for a lot of the same reasons your Iron Man run inspired engagement with all these systems. Very different style game, but the focus on the granular gathering and crafting mechanics and the appreciation it creates of the mechanical benefits you gain from your toils turns out to be my most addictive gameplay loop.
I did something similar with mining/smithing/alteration with my platinum playthrough. I had to get to level 50 which required leveling up a lot of skill that I never really utilized previously. I think I maxed out smithing and still have a couple levels to go so I just dawned some heavy armor and picked fights. 120 hours in total and it’s one of my proudest achievements
So, basically you learned what the R in RPG actually stands for ? It means creating a unique experience by engaging your imagination, and making conscious choices to shape (limit) your character.
So this makes me actually wonder how many people played skyrim with heavy manual role-playing. Like how these constrained playthroughs make people really work with the game's systems but with a justification like "my character is a pyrophobic khajit dragonborn" instead of a challenge/ruleset. I'm a RPer from a bunch of 2000's MMOs before playing tesv too.
this video reminds me on my first playthrough and my current one. i always liked skyrim from the beginning. i played it a lot for hours and hours. but just now im coming back to it after years of it dusting away in my library with me taking a look at the cover every once in a while. then youtube decided its time for some skyrim RP videos. and god damn i loved them. applying some rules on yourself really brings the best out of this game and i didnt have to mod it that hard. my current character wouldnt need a single mod. just left some in for the sake of not having to disable a few mods that dont even alter the gameplay at all. and i fell in love. with the game, the universe its set in, the lore, everything. for the first time ever i was and still am fully immersed into skyrim. what a great game. and now excuse me, i have dragons to slay
Adopting a child is more important to this playstyle than taking a spouse. Mother's Love increases the impact of restoration effects. The increased XP just help you level faster, it doesn't actually impact character abilities.
I adore roleplay-centric runs with permadeath. I've done two so far, one as a hunter, and one as a paladin. Both led me to choosing wildly different playstyles, questlines, spells, and equipment. I didn't use anything that didn't "make sense" for that character. Thanks for bringing more awareness to this type of playstyle.
i hope tes6 will be more balanced, the big problem with skyrim is that its easy to gain money, loot, etc. Nothing requires that much work without putting a limit on yourself
Isn‘t that the whole point why the game is great? If you want to be op early on, you can do it. If you don‘t want to be op, you don‘t use the op stuff. I think it‘s a benefit to the game, that it works like this. Very similar to Elden Ring if you think about it
@@Pluto-c4q i mean the problem is you gotta activly not use the shit the game gives you, it would be nicer if you had to go a bit out of your way to get the stuff, also same like fo4 it underminds the beggining weapons like pipe pistols when you so fast get a 10mm
I love all this, I recently restarted Skyrim with this same idea and it is fantastic. One thing that struck me was just how much I cared about my horse of all things. The money that I had to get to purchase him, the travels we’ve had. I never cared about Skyrim horses beyond their mountain climbing glitchiness but under this playstyle the horse is a true, full blooded companion on this adventure. So glad you’ve rediscovered skyrim’s world view, wonderful video
Great video, for me the realisation was that it's insane that it ALL works to a degree. There's a bunch of shit most people won't ever touch, yet it's still there and worked out to at least be playable as you've shown here. That's what made it great for me, finding out that they put in the effort to make it viable!
I still remember my first alchemist run. It was thrilling, honestly. I remember going to the mines near Morthal for Imp Stool to mix with my Canis Root. There’s a pretty good early game combination for leveling I call the “Blues Brothers” ‘cause it’s just blue mountain flowers + blue butterfly wings. Obviously you can add wheat to that to make it even better, but crafting 15 or so of those by the time you hit Whiterun is a huge early game leveling boost. There’s a ton of blue butterflies in the fields east of Whiterun, too. Glad you had a chance to learn some of those same joys as I experienced. And yeah, go Joov, lol.
I can understand ignoring alchemy, I did a lot of it in Oblivion and Morrowind but also felt it wasn't necessary in Skyrim. Recently I did finally embrace it and found it's super useful. That said, you never got into smithing?! You can make weapons better than almost anything else in the game, especially if you max out enchanting.
I know its late, but, as he said in a comment, he mostly played stealth archer, so, why improve damage when already basically one shotting even on expert, and provides more than enough faction related armors from thieves guild or DB that you arent really required to devote time to making your own that said, i feel you, on my first playthrough, smithing was probably first skill i maxed
I just started getting insane amounts of Skyrim content fed to me on UA-cam this week. This video made me decide to play it again. I haven't played in 4-5 years after 509 hours played on steam alone. Everything you mention is what I remember enjoying about the game most - slow, deliberate, and methodical gameplay. Thanks for the good video!
It's been so fun whenever I catch the streams and I'm glad they're continuing on for now! I've always liked to play games like skyrim with some amount of limitations, and lately I've been getting a lot better about treating encounters in games as life or death without formally setting a perma-death rule (I'd get too frustrated and never want to touch the game again, hah). I love these introspective videos. Excited to see where your run goes!
I never understood the whole stealth archer thing, my friends used to say “it does the most damage” but if you’re worried abt killing enemies quickly, just turn down the difficulty, and if you feel like your leveling up too fast get rid of the 3starter stones. Personally, anything that levels you up vertically isn’t really leveling you up when the game scales enemies to you, just have fun and use the mechanics as you wish. It’s probably why I never got bored of the game and hated the stealth Archer build bc it was slow and boring.
@@willywonka6487 my first three playthroughs were melee, two handed sword shield then stealth melee/dual wield, then did ranger (basically non stealth but still archer) and then mage, it wasn’t until someone mentioned stealth archer being broken that I tried it and then got super bored and never touched the class again
This is why this game is so great, my first play-through the only rule I set on myself is that I could never fast travel. I am glad I made that rule because this game is gorgeous and while it added untold hours to my play-through the immersion it developed in that play-through was incredible!
that note near the end about people in the livestream chat asking what mod your using for the ironman mode kinda makes me feel sad since especially with skyrim (but with gaming in general) most people seem to have lost their whimsy and ways of finding fun in the mundanity of a lot of games without having an external thing (like mods) placing that onto the game like random game modes i remember making up and playing with my friends on halo or gta when we'd just be in an xbox party and vibing
Self control makes single player games the most enjoyable. I love playing a legendary difficulty pure mage with no weapons or armor. You have to learn how to dodge attacks from two handed enemies early game or you die. I made the decision to delay the first dragon mission because they are deadly early on! It also removes the most over powered part of the game, smithing. Sure you can get the impact perk and enchant 100% reduction to destruction magic and stun lock everything, but against groups of enemies you still need a different plan of attack.
You used the west wing for the childrens bedrooms when the greenhouse can quadruple your potions production... And the top floor of the normal longhouse AND entryway house can both have beds (especially if you do not convert it into an 'entryway') Rookie mistake.
First video I've watched from you friend. Love this! I've only played Skyrim on Xbox 360. I still boot it up at times, it's such an experience. Limited but immersive. I laughed at times thinking how has he not done that, but when mods change the game fundamentally, it makes sense. I'm glad you were able to find new life in this wonder
When I went for the platinum in Skyrim I found a refreshing experience, many times I have started a new playthrough, many times I have finished those playthroughs, but after my first run, the others were always the same because I never bothered to get out of my comfort zone, I never cared about the dark brotherhood or the thieves guild, but the platinum run felt more like a journey than a grind. For the 100 thousand trophy, I found myself making potions I could sell and taking bounties, and investing money into ingredients and arrows and whatever The first half of it was made on survival difficulty too, so the stakes were way higher with the limited save I also found myself wrecking havoc in all holds, breaking out of prison, fast traveling via wagons, collecting the daedric artifacts, etc It was a really cool journey.
I've done so many Permadeath iron man runs, modded and not modded. It's so much fun and has gotten me to keep playing, but it gets kind of scary when i don't need to look up anything. But i remember long ago when, after playing with mods for so long, that when i stopped using them and just explored the game, I had probably the most enjoyable time playing skyrim ever. This one event changed my view on gaming, to try and enjoy everything about a game instead of just focusing on the main quests or story. this helped me find games, that were originally unenjoyable, actually fun and worth my time.
My biggest takeaway from this video is that the biggest flaw with vanilla skyrim is ultimately the ability to get your hands on powerful resources *too* quickly, making a large number of really cool and interesting mechanics redundant and unnecessary outside of challenge runs like this one. It really does hark back to that quote "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" as said by Sid Meier. I could be wrong either in my understanding or my wording, but that's the way I see it.
I've long since beaten Skyrim's main questline, several times in fact. And yet, I still passionately play this beloved game. Mods let me recraft the world to suit my current game needs. I find great enjoyment in just roleplaying out various characters, none of which are the 'Chosen One'. Want to play a farmer? A beggar? A shop owner? A city Guard with a knee problem? I'm sure that a mod can help you experience that inside this wonderfully made world.
Skyrim was kind of the first game I played after Rune Scape, lol. My family was very strict on what I could do with TV's and Computers and so playing Skyrim and even Runescape were a super no way, lol. (I bought a Gameboy Color with baby-sitting money and lived in terror that it and Pokémon Yellow would be taken, lol) So I played Runescape at school. Years later on my own with my own PC... I bought Skyrim because of a friend. So... grinding and walking everywhere was all I knew, lol. Honestly, not being able to play and then being able to do so? Yeah i went all in! While I didn't do Ironman, Standard was how I played, I found myself at level 60 with obscene amounts of money and spells! I was so bad at hoarding everything, lol. I still hoard but cups and cutlery are safe from my compulsive behavior! 🤣😂🤭
I have been an avid miner in Skyrim for 10 years now. The transmute ore spell made me a fortune. I even attempted a "millionaire" challange with only mining and smithing but vendors got on my nerves by never having close to enough gold 😂
Skyrim really clicked for me when I decided to play a Restoration/Illusion Mage. I used a mod to increase the number of companions and just kept them buffed and healthy for the whole run. Lucien became my bro for life.
I might not do the perma-death. But I love the idea of paying for a death with a whiterun to greay besrds delivery of 100 chopped wood. I was already one yo interact qith most of the systems in the game which are interesting, my biggest problem with Skyrim has been the lack of visual diversity and that quickly grinds me down.
Nah, even having to punish myself with like an hour of busywork for a death sounds ridiculous. I know OP might have all day to play games, but most people dont.
I've never care a little for reading complete books series that the game brings. I'm hoping that, at last, I'll be reading them to know lore and in the way bringing up historical related events to actually learn throught itself, I mean, a videogame.
Interesting, I always play primary crafters in Bethesda games. Always cool seeing how other people play games. Like the archer is something that never appealed to me XD Probably ties in to my enjoyment of the life sim aspect.
I love how people learn to not use fast travel in these games. I almost never fast travel in open world games. People beg devs for bigger more detailed maps and then when we get them, they just fast travel everywhere. I love actually having to spend the time to adventure through the land with all the interactions and stuff. It FEELS like you're really living in these worlds.
When I see any mod titled "Overhaul" I ignore. It's one person's preference. Only mods I use on Skyrim is SkyUI, and more trees foliage in towns, better water... Basically visual for a 13 yearold game. Starfield though... That needed a few more intensive mods... And even then it's no Skyrim.
@@maynardburger Not really. It makes the UI more practical. Where as "combat overhaul" and "wildlife overhaul" are generally an individual's belief that the player should have more health in combat, or maces should do more damage because they watched the history channel one time, or wolves shouldn't hunt in packs because they heard it on a podcast. The SkyUI makes the UI more practical as it was designed for 1 button click on a controller, and on a TV from across the room, completely ignoring keyboard and mouse users. If they had bothered adding a proper inventory and UI for keyboard/mouse players using a monitor, then the UI mod wouldn't be needed.
I agree that restricting yourself can make the game much more engaging, especially with mods to restrict you, but I'm not sure I'd personally say that's enough for me to say the game is better. In the same sense that nuzlocks are really fun, but I don't consider them when I'm trying to judge the quality of a pokemon game
Relaly enjoy this vid. had a very similar experience this past summer. Decided I'd be a wood elf two hander and stick to survival difficulty. Really made me use the things in the game and finally interact with it in a way that isn't "quest marker simulator". Felt good. might pick a different build for a winter play through.
May I ask what you actually DID in your previous times you played the game?
Yeah, totally. Honestly, I should have explained this better in the video. Typically, I played stealth, changing up per run between illusion, conjuration, one-handed, archery, or some mix of any of these. I'd also put more focus on doing faction quests and getting faction gear, like the Dark Brotherhood or Nightinggale sets, so no need to craft my own stuff. And because I was either one-shotting things with all the stealth damage bonuses, even playing on Expert or higher, or using things like Frenzy, I never felt short on damage, so I didn't worry to much about smithing upgrades. And because my damage would always work pretty well, I never worried about getting new shouts. I honestly find them pretty drab in general; for the games main snowflake mechanic, I find the shouts pretty underwhelming in a general playthrough.
Also, I'd pretty much just loot and clear through dungeons and stop back in to town to sell off things to the shops there. My basic gameplan there was a 1:20 weight:value ratio, so I was only really looting things with good value. This is pretty effective, and it meant that I never did anything like Alchemy for money, because shops only have 1.5-2k gold at any given time, so having 100k in potions would have been a real ball ache to deal with selling.
Enchanting is pretty common for me, like I said, I missed it a bit in this style of gameplay, but I typically just threw relevant enchantments on any gear that wasn't faction stuff, or eventually replaced it with faction stuff. Again, I know you can break the game with enchanting, but I never felt the need to, so I never really did. And I don't typically care about enchantments for weapons; I don't enjoy the micromanaging that comes with the charges, and, again, I never really needed the extra damage anyways.
As for like, actual gameplay? I'd just do whatever felt fun. Sometimes that was just doing Dawnguard and then dropping that playthrough, maybe I could come back later and do Thieves Guild, I dunno. Skyrim has never been a game where I felt particularly pressed to do any given thing, so I'd pretty much just bop around and do whatever felt like it would be a good time.
That's what I was thinking. My first thought was, "Oh, you actually slowed down and played the game?"
Someone did a video on “Why did *everyone* make a stealth archer?” and concluded that essentially the whole game rewards that behavior. Not actually literally everyone, but most people did it at some point or another.
I did decide to include a mod where the shops gained money proportional to the amount you use them. Basically a minor buff to money-on-hand because of your economic boosting.
It's very clear to me that some people havnt sunk hundreds of hours in the ps3/360 original release of skyrim.
Agree. Alchemy, Smithing and Enchanting were core skills to me. So much of this video is discovering things, that on first playthrough of initial release, were what made the game so great originally for me.
Errr make that thousands .... 1.8k hrs in Oldrim since 2011 & 1.6k hrs in Skyrim SE Then again I'm a PC gamer & modding gives the game longevity. Console players however may be a different story entirely.
my first playthrough lasted 300 hours. I played a sneak thief orc assassin named Gwar (did not know about the band when I named him lolol) and he just blundered through the game. it is still my fondest memories of this game
Xbox 360 with hundreds of hours, definitely hits different
I think my combined hours for all the console versions is over 2k...
I forget who said it but a major game dev once said, “Players will optimize the fun out of their own experience.” And I think that explains a lot about what you say in this video.
Sid Meier I believe, and it does fit.
people misuse this quote a lot, it starts with "when given the chance", sid meier didn't mean it as optimization is always bad.
I don't think this fully applies because it is still the job of game designers to try to make the most fun way to play the one that people gravitate towards naturally. Skyrim is a game where even casual noobs will play in the least interesting way because it does an abysmal job guiding you to a fun experience. And this still doesn't fix the bad writing and quest experience (hard to salvage when you can make a total of zero real choices in the game's story). It just makes the exploring part better. Which, is a lot. But it's not a silver bullet to make Skyrim as a whole good.
That saying is usually accompanied with "It's the developer's job to protect players from themselves". Now I don't think it can fully be done with Skyrim, since its design goal is to be an RPG that presents you with a bunch of tools to help you realize your vision of your character. Imbalance is inevitable in a game like this, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
@@swan-cloud Orthogonal design is the solution to this.
This basically means giving the player varying options that do different things or are mechanically different to achieve the same goals, instead of direct upgrades to previous choices. Skyrim does this in numerous ways. The smallest and most obvious example of this is the melee weapon types: Swords swing fast and deal low damage, Axes are middle speed and middle damage, and Maces are low speed and high damage. But Skyrim does this with nearly everything in it's design.
*raises hand* i do in fact like to mine ore and use it to craft items in normal Skyrim gameplay.
Same! I don’t like, seek it out or anything, but I like to mine it whenever I happen across a vein
I have to say that it got a lot easier and faster when I found out you could just dual wield pickaxes and attack the vein
I also like mining. I do not like leveling the smithing which has been made way too fricking tedious and slow even with exploits so I just console command the hell out of it, but I do like going around the world finding ore to build the things that I like.
I actively get transmutation, mine iron, and morph it into gold by waiting an hour instantly after casting the spell to keep all my magic up, and then I make a bunch of gold jewelry and hit level 100 smithing
I have always played Skyrim as a hoarding Dovakiin, so, I always interacted with the alchemy systems, the mining systems, the enchanter and College of Winterhold Forge. Not because I had to, because because they were available, I had the components and I was always money-poor, because of said hoarding
It never really occurred to me that people wouldn't interact with those systems because to me, they were a large part of the game
Exactly what i was coming to say. Crazy that for someone else putting the necessity and limitations on certain systems totally changes their perception and gameplay experience
I was similar but i was always cash rich because i would sell outright duplicates.
I always did this as well, but kind of only half way. In other words, I would hoard every ingredient I found to test with alchemy, I'd mine every ore I found for smithing, disenchant every new enchanted item I found, etc. but I didn't actually use the products of the systems much. I never focused on enchanting, or potions. Smithing, admittedly, was different, and I did always make my own armor and weapons.
But even magic and shouts, I've never properly engaged with. The most I've ever used magic is to heal myself, and a few times casting some destruction spells to see what they do. I also never actually really bought things from vendors, except spell tomes (for spells that I would never use). Basically, I hoarded everything, and used almost nothing. I used to spend hours hauling every piece of valuable gear from every dungeon I cleared just to sell it for money I never used. Walking to and from fast travel locations while over encumbered was a regular experience for me.
Same, I would hoard ingredients that i causally pick up through out and then once and a while spam potion creating. Keep the basic health, stamina and magika potions and sell the rest.
I agree with him in the micromanaging being annoying so I found away that alchemy suited me easily
first time i started morrowind i stole everything i could in the first house
not sure what i'm gonna do with this plate but i'll take it, since i can
Player finally has fun in Skyrim by actuallu playing Skyrim
I agree, once I forced myself to use certain aspects I had a lot more fun. Enchanting by itself is underwhelming, but enchanting coupled with alchemy to boost it creates powerful enchantments that enhance other gameplay. Reducing casting cost made mage builds insane.
Gamerant article incoming
Hardly. Skyrims incentives the player towards one or two play styles unless you purposefully try to make the game inefficient via challenge runs. Alchemy is a shit, boring system, forging is a shit boring system, enchantment is tedious garbage. It's not fun unless you try to go against the core of the game because the game is badly made.
@@JenIsHungry Dude, enchanting alchemy and smithing are how you get the most broken strong stuff in the game, even without any exploits. Once you find a single imp stool, mira tapinalla, and canis root, then plant them, the game goes on easy mode, lingering damage paralysis poisons. Wheat and blue flowers get health potions stronger than the strongest restoration before alchemy level 60. Enchanting is insanely strong, and putting all 3 skills together to make the best gear is great. Crafting that kind of gear is what enables you to make any playstyle you want viable. Stealth, full mage, battle mage, pacifist, summoner, a mix of all of them, etc.
@adamushu except broken does not equal run.
Alchemy enchanting loops letting you 1 shot dragons with an iron dagger does not make the game more interesting.
I keep telling people "efficiency is bad for things you care about," and this is an excellent example. Everything you did was fantastically inefficient, which is exactly what you SHOULD be doing when you are trying to have fun. Why would you want to have your fun as fast as possible, instead of making it last as long as you could? That's just dumb.
Well see, some people don't play games and make videos for a living, meaning their free time available for gaming can be severely limited. It can really be a matter of doing things efficiently in order to make progress, or just not playing that particular game at all. Not to mention that min-maxing can be fun in it's own right, in a sort of "making the most efficient factorio world" kind of way.
@@theKashConnoisseur And no matter why you are choosing to be efficient, the efficiency is bad for things you care about. There are things that matter, and that you would like, which are fundamentally incompatible with the inefficiency. When you choose efficiency, you are choosing to reduce or remove those things from your experience. Sometimes that makes the entire experience pointless, because what you WANTED from it was one of those things.
@@cdarklock SO you're saying it's better to just not play at all vs playing the game efficiently, all other things being equal? Interesting, a logical mind would think that not playing would get in the way of enjoying the game more than playing it efficiently...
I forget who said it but it goes something like this "Engineering the Fun out of the game." That point when you play more than you did before but it doesn't feel fun any more because it isn't the fun parts, it's the hyper-efficient singular boss fight for the one thing you need for your helm's final gem slot.
@@theKashConnoisseur No. Maybe you should read what I said again, you don't seem to understand any of it.
The further into this video I get the more my fruitloop gets flipped, you never bothered with SHOUTS?! WHAT IS WROOONG WITH YOOOUUUU?!
He said his normal playthroughs were heavily modded. Which means he was so overpowered he never needed shouts.
@@trucid2 but if he wanted to be so overpowered then shouts would've helped, not to mention all the other uses, like how some things can't be found without whirlwind sprint, or using become ethereal to jump off high places, using kyne's piece to send all the objects in the room flying without getting in trouble, bend will on dragons for rides, slow time to catch up to fleeing enemies, they're just so useful so why would you deny yourself the magic that makes you special? We are Ysmir, the dragon of the north. Su'um ahrk morah.
I barely used shouts either, because I like to play these kinds of games by just wandering around and doing whatever, and finding random words here and there never really came together as something useful or interesting.
In several hundred hours, I think I visited the Greybeards once. After that, I was like "well I'm never walking up this fucking mountain again"
@@trucid2 modding is what you make it, and most mods aren't meant to make you OP, just to customize your experience. The creator of Ordinator (the perk overhaul he mentioned in the beginning) for example has also created a mod that overhauls/adds onto the existing shout system. Basically you meditate on the words you already know and find new ways to combine them which unlocks new shouts. So I decided I would make one of my characters take her role as Dragonborn very seriously, and that playthrough I basically stopped using regular magic altogether because the shouts gave me all the magic I needed.
Shouts are extremely lame and boring.
Oh man this was so good. Each time I type something out you end up talking about it!
10:00 - Regarding the role of enchanting in this ruleset. There's a fantastic video essay on Old School Runescape titled "Runescape is awesome, and here's why" by a creator named Marstead in which they talk about "Breakthroughs" in Old School Runescape. Completing a quest which gives you a new shortcut, access to a weapon type, a new recipe etc. etc. - Runescape is chock full of "Holy crap, this changes everything for me" moments which in my opinion is the bread and butter of Runescape's design. The aim of this ruleset was to try and do our best with what is a pretty "meh" reward system in vanilla and give a playthrough more "holy crap FINALLY" moments.
You're right though! If I remember properly, the act of adding a new enchantment to my repertoire was more exciting than most of the enchantments were in practice. What I truly found rewarding was the gold because on survival mode, curing a disease costs 100 gold at an altar. Paying rent at the inn starts to add up and travelling without carriages can be a death sentence early if a sabre cat or bear caught me off guard.
To the point you make throughout this video, it's still so funny to me how a few small tweaks to the perceived values of items and rewards can entirely change the feeling of a game when you play it. Bethesda spends an abhorrent amount of time littering their worlds with items that are useless on an average playthrough. One of my favorite things to do is find ways that float more niche items and mechanics to the top of the pool so that they can have their time in the "Holy shit this changes everything" zone.
Side note: Love the use of CFPAO...I need that mordhau power attack animation in my game
Side Side Note: Nobody tell this guy about Anniversary Edition or Goldenhills Plantation it will ruin everything for him
Hot damn, what a dream. Believe it or not, I'm a massive fan of your work, and have been for a while. It's fun to see how much the runs differed between us, even with the same basic foundation; I didn't mention it, but I took alters off the table for curing diseases, but I did make the call to allow cures from wandering Vigilantes of Stendarr.
It's a mod thing, so I didn't want to bring it up in a video specifically talking about how cool the base game can be, but that mordhau animation single handedly changed the way my brain thinks about the melee combat in Skyrim. CFPAO is a godsend.
All that said, you're a real inspiration, and this has been a really validating thing for me to read. Thanks for laying down the groundwork for this thing that I've had so much fun with.
Joov jumpscare
A wild joob appears
@@ThaneBishopthanks for the kind words. This was one of my favorite video essays in a while. It does a better job of explaining why I love challenge runs than I can!
Hi there, sorry to interrupt. How do I find you on Twitch? Thane Bishop was a no at least in my search. I like how you tacle deeper feelings of my favorite game so count me in :D. I always look for a way to make Skyrim a bit more engaging and challenging so this is so recognizable. I love mods but not the ones which make it more easy. Graphics, sounds, music, ambiance, clutter, quest expansions and more perks ands thats enough for me
My friend... you have discovered something amazing. You have discovered, wait for it.....Roleplay.
Welcome. We're so glad you are here. Know that this can seep into literally everything. I genuinely am happy for you. Some of the funnest times in my gaming history is when I took a step back and truly immersed myself in the game as if I was my character.
I really can't figure out what he was doing in all his other playthroughs. Skyrim's one and only good quality is that it allows you to do a facsimile of almost any activity. It's only good as a roleplaying game.
Through all the elder scrolls I've played the main resource I was managing was my character's decisions. Power is at your fingertips, but is the moral price always worth it?
((hugs)) right? like, hon, it's on the box. You're doing the thing we were - ostensibly - meant to do. I'm glad, and welcome to the club, but like... what did you think it was before?
@@iivin4233 I wonder if these are the peopel that talk abotu how much of a big deal it is that the main story is weak. like, yeah, it is. sure. but my herb merchant isn't even the dragonborn. she and her tamed wolf that protects her from highwaymen haven't even heard of shouts. what's the problem?
@AerynKDesigns it's nice to see more people slipping into what we enjoy on almost a daily basis haha
@@garrettbaker8098 absolutely :)
"Didn't use alchemy..."
-you definitely owe vannila an apology
"Didn't use shouts..."
-Were you even playing Skyrim at that point?😅
- seriously though, this is crazy to me, even if t just use shouts to push people off of or jump off of cliffs myself i rarely just decide not to use them entirely unless i am playing with dragons locked off.
He did use shout, he's talking about using it more thoroughly
@@Hell_O7 that wasn't the way he said it, he said it like he rarely if ever used Fus... I've had janked combat skill runs where my pedestrian ass was basically only able to kill with that shout... It was how I found Sabre cats seem to resist fall damage.
Im building quest rep before completing the bleak falls barrow quest - which unlocks the first shout and no dragon attacks.😅
I'll be thane of several places before I ever fight a dragon😎
bro just didnt play the game is what i got from this video. same vibe for Starfield.
@@poolhall9632 I tend to get to a decent level too, I try mostly visiting everywhere that changes like Stendar first.
It's bizarre listening to you talk about how you "normally" do things. You're talking about all these systems you never mess with, and are finally experiencing for the first time. All of them are the core things that keep pulling me back to the game, even now, nearly thirteen years after I played it on release day...
Same here. This states the obvious with such a sense of wonder.
It's cool that the game has all these systems but if most of them never even matter in gameplay then what's the point in engaging with them? Sure, I suppose engaging with them could be the point on its own but at that point why not just play a game that actually focuses on these specific systems? And that's really the problem with many Bethesda games, they try to do everything so they end up not being particularly good at any one thing but rather average or below average in a lot.
@@amysteriousviewer3772 my view is that they do enough of it well enough to be engaging for anyone interested in pursuing a given interest. Alchemy may be better in other games, but it's good enough here to be fun for anyone that wants to try it. Same with most of the game's systems. Elder Scrolls wouldn't feel the same without any one of these systems. Heck, they removed enchanting as a skill for one game and enough people were annoyed that they brought it back.
I love the variety, even if it means that certain areas aren't as good as they could otherwise be. It'd be nice if they got the variety AND the depth, don't get me wrong, but this is better than leaving things out.
@@amysteriousviewer3772 but most of those systems do matter and just because others don’t use them doesn’t mean they’re not useful. There are systems in Elden Ring and Baldurs Gate 3 that you can completely ignore and still beat the game. I’d also mention the guy said he didn’t use those systems because mods made him not realize it, which came years later.
@@tzmedia5345 Yeah, i can understand that. I think my main issue with Skyrim is that the enemies are so easy and braindead that finding creative ways to deal with them isn't really all that rewarding to me.
When I first played Skyrim I had never played anything like it so I naturally wanted to interact with all the systems until someone told me that it was super inefficient level wise and ruined all my fun
That's because while you're learning how to pick locks, the draugr are training. While you're studying restoration, the draugr are training. While you're taking a course in smithing, the draugr are training...
[I started writing what I thought would be a short comment about how I dislike that attitude, especially in Elder Scrolls games, and wound up with over 500 words so what follows is a bit more of a rant than I originally intended]
yeah I fucking hate that attitude, it's the same shit as in Oblivion and Morrowind with trying to maximize ability score gains by very carefully leveling skills. While there's some truth to the theory (like, you probably shouldn't make acrobatics or athletics major/minor skills bc they *will* over-level you), I played both without focusing on max efficiency and it was unironically way more fun. That's why, while I listen to it probably once a year bc it's great background noise while I'm at work, I strongly disagree with PatricianTV's assessment of the leveling/difficulty system in his Oblivion retrospective, and was even more frustrated that he criticised Starfield for being "worse" in that regard. You don't need to hyper-efficiently level everything to have the most fun in these games, on the contrary, the feeling that you have to becomes a burden on an otherwise fun experience with plenty of other ways to maximize your power, like custom spell crafting. While I get that being too underpowered can be frustrating, and too overpowered boring, Oblivion has a full slider for difficulty, and Skyrim 6 different options (plus the new survival mode in AE), which are there specifically to help the player tune the game to their enjoyment. The idea that locking in a difficulty for an entire playthrough is somehow necessary or more "honorable" or legit is actually a toxic mindset that causes players to handicap their own fun. Personally, I think Skyrim handles this best because if you do over-level, even if you don't want to adjust difficulty, completing that dungeon that's now really tough bc higher level enemies are spawning will usually reward you with at least one or two pieces of significantly better loot, meaning you can catch back up to the curve pretty easily, and as the player you feel even more like you earned that better gear. These are huge games, and not every quest or dungeon, or even encounter *within* a dungeon, is going to be on the same playing field difficulty-wise, even if you control for difficulty setting, player level, main story progress, etc. The other day, I had to turn down the difficulty a notch for the skeleton dragon fight in Labyrinthian because even with the Atronach Stone, Chrysamere (CC weapon that gives 10% absorb magic), resist frost gear, and a companion with summons, the stamina drain and slowed movement from the 5 skeleton mages and dragon were just too frustrating to be fun. Once lowered, it was still a challenge, but also still rewarding to complete, and I bumped the difficulty back up afterwards, finding even the Dragon Priest fight at the end of the dungeon to be way less frustrating. You could argue that this is poor game balance or design, and maybe there's some truth to that, but with a game this size, not everything is going to be balanced perfectly for every player, so they have to be able to take things into their own hands and understand what makes things fun or frustrating or boring *for them*, and make adjustments accordingly. Even games generally regarded as well-balanced, like those from FromSoft, still occasionally run into these issues, and in Elden Ring, they combat this by making it so there are variyingly difficult encounters even within close proximity to each other, so you can always leave, level up and/or find new gear, and come back when the challenge will be less frustrating.
I'm convinced at this point that people who complain about level scaling in Skyrim has never played it, or they played it 10+ years ago and has since interacted with it solely through terrible memes online.
Enemies in Skyrim has a cap where they can scale up to, different depending on the type of enemy. The mob draugrs can't scale their level to as high as the boss draugrs, and those two sub groups can be split down even further. For example, the boss draugr of an earlier dungeon can never scale past level 30.
There are no level 50 wolves or mud crabs, yet you can still see them everywhere, even at level 80. THIS IS NOT OBLIVION, PEOPLE!
@@resm-oe9ji I played oblivion the same way where I just picked the skills I wanted to use and leveled up normally until someone explained that if you pick skills you don’t use and rarely level up, the enemies will stay low level. But the thing is, if you just want the game to be easier why not just turn down the difficulty? Text book “gamers will optimize the fun out of games”
@@resm-oe9jiI'm also pretty sure that not only do dungeons scale to a certain point, but the area that said dungeon can also lock it up to a point. Like all of the Reach starts at lvl 15 and goes upwards from there, and all dungeons in the Reach also start at lvl 15. Compared to most of Whiterun, that have dungeons that start at lvl 5 with a few exceptions like that Falmer cave north of Whiterun
My brother passed away in May. This video brought me to tears because Skyrim was always our favorite game growing up. It was hard to get through but it made me feel close to him, and I appreciate that.
I’m gonna start a new Skyrim playthrough tomorrow in his honor. I hope we as a community never let this game die. Thanks for making this video.
Thanks for sharing a bit of your story. I'm sad to hear your brother is no longer with you, but I'm glad my words could help a little. I hope you enjoy the new playthrough
I'm sorry to hear of your loss. My father passed away in January, and I recently learned how to play chess because he loved the game. It is a good way to feel close to people that are gone now. Much love from NC ❤
With enchanting and smithing potion cheese being my primary route to Skyrim demigodhood, it's a bit shocking to hear of experienced players that have never seriously interacted with the mechanic.
Same
It highlights why the self limitations are important. Once you have the understanding of the mechanics, if you mix them too much you become The Spiffing Britt and your character threatens to emerge from the game into reality and wreak havoc.
@@brent8491 what enticed me to the cheese, personally, is the game level-scaling with you. There comes a point where my Dragonborn should be able to storm into some random cave on a fetch quest and just mollywhop every single being that dares to look at him crosswise. Potion cheese grants me that power. My self-limitation is not using cheese when fighting important bosses. An example: Alduin is _supposed to be a tough fight,_ even for a daedric-favored Dragonborn. So one-shotting him with a billion damage fork doesn't fit my roleplay.
Ditto.
That’s not cheese that’s just the basic crafting mechanics lol
The feeling of starting a new Skyrim character, with an alternate start mod, with the ability to go and do anything by creating your own story. Is one of the best feelings in gaming.
This was crazy to hear as my standard pay through generally involves picking every flower, eating every edible and use alchemy to make all my gold, you get to the point where you walk up to the potion vendors, buy all the mats, turn them into pots that sell for more and repeat. I do a lap of all the towns every so often and it power levels fast af. I also use the transmute gold > rings method for BS leveling.
I level my bullshit by annoying the piss out of my girlfriend every time she think she has a peaceful moment.
Seeing this after your stealth archer video, it confirms that you're definitely the type to optimize the fun out of a game. That's the vibe I got from that video, and I'm glad you're experiencing everything now, but it definitely felt like you were missing the fun of just hitting someone with a big hammer and exploring a dungeon just to see what you find, etc. just because it wasn't "optimal" before
There's more depth to this line of thinking than the thought-terminating cliche of "optimizing the fun out of a game".
Theorycrafting a strong build or finding fast ways of powering up is both intrinsically and extrinsically rewarding. The game encourages this, as you can immediately feel the positive feedback in moment-to-moment gameplay.
The drawback, though, is that one-shotting enemies gets boring after a while. Optimization in itself is fun, but you'll need a higher mountain to climb and Skyrim simply doesn't provide that. You know how to accomplish your objective faster, how to progress more with less time spent, and you can't simply erase that knowledge.
The novelty of picking up herbs and mining provides enjoyment for a while, but at some point it becomes a chore and you might not get as much out of it as you're putting in. Why not simply loop vendors, you'd accomplish your objective faster with less tedium. You won't need to spend as much time interfacing with the systems, but at the same time your experience with them will be less meaningful.
The key issue is self-regulation. After a decade of building characters it's near impossible to ignore the wealth of knowledge you have.
Essentializing the issue as "optimizing the fun out of a game" ignores why it happens, and frames being "optimal" as a pejorative. The antidote to the staleness brought by prolonged optimal play might be conscious focus on role play, arbitrary rulesets or challenge runs or, but the fact of the matter is that optimization is rewarded directly, but punished indirectly.
Funny how sometimes the best experience a game can offer is when you refuse to engage with its core systems. Dishonored 2 with no powers is one of the best immersive sim experiences I've had. Your wits supplemented only by flesh and steel... And if you play right, they're all you'll need.
With Skyrim, I did what I call the gladiator run. You live and die by your sword and shield. No other armor allowed. Pretty simple.
See, damage reduction in Skyrim comes in the way of "set it and forget it" methods. Set your armour on and forget about, set Alteration Flesh spells on your hotkeys and forget to use them in the fight.
The Block skill tree is different from these in one simple, crucial regard: it requires you to be active. You have to remember to block. And blocking and bashing take stamina, so you can't just turtle it out. With blocking, you need to mind your stamina and properly use the Block skills you unlock to survive combat. In other words, you need to be more present, more immersed. Made the combat more fun without a single mod installed for it. Restrictions never felt so liberating.
I should try that. I initially played a heavy armor two handed sword restoration playthrough, all perks to health - so a tank. Then I played stealth archer (lololol). And then alchemist/enchanter/magician
But I should try unarmored at some point, it sounds fun
I did the sword and shield on my first playthrough. It lasted around 200h.
@@dodgyrhubarb457 💯 as a kid, dual-wielding was the coolest shit to me, but also made the combat a "mash L2/R2 while backpedaling until everything is dead" affair, something that's weirdly both difficult and boring, because you just take loads of damage, especially against crowds, but has very little variety in how fights are approached. My first breakthrough was when I started messing with enchanting and discovered the absorb health enchant-something that made the style more fun at lower levels, but with 100 enchanting and dragonbone weapons, makes you all but invincible. My second breakthrough was discovering just how fun and dynamic blocking, and especially bashing to interrupt attacks (and stagger if it was a power attack), made the combat. Now I'm 80-ish hours into a playthrough with no one-handed (or shields), and fighting with two-handed weapons is maybe the most fun I've had with the game since the days of playing at my friend's house, taking turns pickpocketing everyone's house keys to rob them in the middle of the night.
Doing a hardcore run of dishonored was one of the best experiences I ever had in gaming. No reloading saves, 1 life. I've gotten all the achievements for both games and getting ghost/clean hands was really just a trial of abusing quick saves. But actually playing it like I was the character, one life, no rewinding time. Made me appreciate how difficult the game can be and how hard it would truly be to avoid unnecessary killing in their situation.
To add to your set and forget problem, ive always ran a mod called magic investiture or something like that. All those "flesh" spells instead of costing magicka and lasting a short duration reduce maximum magicka and act as a toggle.
and never add any points in Health, only stamina
I’ve tried several playthrus as “not-the-Dragonborn” or “reluctant Dragonborn”, which forces the player character to use the other mechanisms to survive and succeed.
Oblivion was where I started never engaging with the main quest in Bethesda games and it significantly improved my experience.
You also need mods to do that comfortably (and unfortunately many mods are made under the assumption that you don't!).
@@sunyavadinin morrowind, the main quest would straight up tell you to abandon it and do some side quests instead to get ready
Honestly, the Dragon Born part of Skyrim was the least interesting part for me. The civil war is a much better story, and IMO, if the Dragon Born aspect and shouts were removed from the game, I think it would be a better game. I'm on a current play through just like you. I used a mod to start in Solitude and it's been great.
@@sunyavadin IMO both Oblivion amd Skyrim totally shat the bed with their MQ. Both make it feel too immediately necessary and then trigger annoying interuptors in the form of the gates and dragons.
I hate both and almost always never start the main quest lines now which really sucks. Morrowind was better in this regard and I hope they go back an learn from that.
Tell me NOT to rush the MQ, and then trigger the interuptors much later in the quest line, much after I got invested in the story. Also it's not as disrupting to the rest of the game.
Still played all 3 games for hundreds of hours but it's probably my biggest beef with the game.
Mods don't fix Skyrim. They... wait for it... modify it.
Watching your vid was kinda interesting, because what you did is how I kinda always played the game, and a lot of people actually do. Not with a strict rule-set specifically, but treating it as the RPG it is.
And yes, it is a RPG. It surely lacks a lot of mechanics you would now be inclined to throw in... and I would partially agree. Partially because what makes a RPG a RPG is not the game, but the player.
Not the question of what the game offers you, but a question of how you approach the game. And if you spend time in the game doing stuff in the game, not relying on guides, best / optimal paths. And play in a way in "Would this make sense for my character". - Like the Healing Spell. If I play a pure warrior-type character with no affinity to magic, would that character use the healing spell?
The spell is there and available, and as player you would be inclined to use it. But would the character you imagined even get the idea to use something like a healing spell?
The poblem with that is that many players enjoy doing the best they can to overcome a problem and try to leverage their full abilities against it. Limiting yourself in games can often feel like ignoring the obvious solution and trying you best to walk around in circles a bit before actually solving the problem. I prefer it if the games are actually designed to get players to use this stuff instead of just throwing everything in and saying "do what you want make your own fun" ... of course this requires a certain skill from the development team. Like it says in the video I can use buff potions to make myself stronger .. but why should I if the game is easily beaten without it. Would it not be great if using the potion actually made a difference in me beating something or not? This line of thinking is of course related to difficulty which is not necessarily my primary focus with this argument.
My main point is some players will think "Hey by limiting myself I can actually use all this other stuff I never use" and get fun out of it and other players will think "man this situation would be so damn simple if I would just hit it with my sword (so to speak)" and get annoyed by purposefully ignoring the obvious answer in front of them. At the very least the devs should be aware what the obvious answer is (if there is one) an make sure its a least fun to do.
The reason Skyrim offers so many different ways to solve problems is precisely so you can leave out certain mechanics which do not match your chosen play through style. It requires self discipline to do this…sure it is easy to be the Battlemage Dovakiin…use everything available then say Skyrim is too easy and boring….this is how children play it, and why they get no satisfaction after just a few hours.
@@chidori0117 Skyrim allows you to open the console and spawn infinite money. Every time you play the game you are a google search away from having infinite wealth and power. I don't see any difference in choosing not to use the console commands and choosing not to min/max. Same thing with the difficulty scaling in the game. You could also choose to play the game on any difficulty, setting it on the easiest difficulty and then complaining about how easy the game is, why would anyone do that? So yes, do what you want and make your own fun, if fun to you is the easy or hard difficulty thats what this game is here for. Also I can assure you on higher difficulties, even as a stealth archer, a potion or poison can be the difference between life and death.
Also skyrim introduces you to all these mechanics, you just chose not to use them or fully explore them. Again, not the designers fault but your own. You start skyrim two basic spells. If you choose never to read a spell book thats on you, don't pretend its the games fault you weren't interested in its magick system.
@@jasonhymes3382 I guess my point is I would just rather play a game that is designed to be fun for some and not others instead of a game that is designed for everybody to have fun as long as they make the fun themselves.
Yes I do see a difference between cheating and using game mechanics. Its a fairly easy for me to distinguish external helps and obvious cheating/bug abusing from clearly intent gameplay mechanics. My point about Skyrim is that the "easy" solution you dont have to work for .. its given to you. You have to actively ignore many mechanics in order to make your own fun. (Or at least the video says so) This is different to when certain mechanics are hidden or to be discovered or achieved by some sort of feat that THEN make the game easier. At least for me because that entails a sense of discovery/learning/accomplishment instead of a sense of handicapping myself.
My point is exactly what you said last the designers did not design a coherent experience they designed a sandbox and left it to the player to balance things out. I am not a game dev. Its like cooking I prefer a finely made meal instead of somebody handing me high quality ingriedients since I am no cook. I am not saying one is better than the other but that the intentional limiting of ones own abilities is something not all players enjoy and would prefer a more thought out challenge which still can have multiple solutions just that every solutions has its pros/cons and limitations.
@@chidori0117 I think there's a general misunderstanding in what games like Skyrim are for some people.
First and foremost, it is a single-player action RPG. There is no need for optimization or efficient builds.
Like, there's absolutely no requirement to go for these, except your own drive to do so.
This also kinda reminds me of all the people who skip every dialogue in games and then complain about a lack of content and them being through the game too fast.
I disagree on this being a developer skill issue, but an issue with appreciating a game for what it is by some players. Sure, you could have a stricter mechanical narrative that would force you a certain way. But ultimately, that would take more from the game than it would offer.
These are open-world games, as close to sandbox as a story game can be. It IS a "make your own story" type of game and that puts the player in the position of being responsible for their own fun.
Which is generally a thing though, the player is the one in charge of having fun or not.
And for those who won't or can't take that step back, for those people there are other games and, in case of Skyrim, modifications. But this doesn't mean that base-game Skyrim is mechanically flawed by not forcing you to use certain mechanics, it basically just means that this game is not the game you think it should be and wasn't meant to be the game you think it should be.
The choice, the responsibility of the choice is yours and yours alone. And that is what Skyrim and other games like it offer you.
To choose how you have fun. And that is, I think, why Skyrim is still relevant.
If it would have, those restrictions you mentioned, I doubt that it would be where it still is.
Blacksmithing and Alchemy have always been my favorite things to do in Skyrim. Fun to watch someone find joy in it like I did waaaaaay back in 2011.
Additional Starts for Alternate Starts has a start where you can start in Meeko's shack with your family. Meeko starts out as your dog from the beginning and you can set out on your dragonborn adventures together from the start
Well i know what ill be doing for the next 2 months now. Thank you good sir ✨
Hello new playthrough, where have you been all my life?
Perfect timing, I was hungry for a 33:21 minute breakfast
Nothing starts the day off right like a 33 Minute 21 Second Minute Breakfast!
Playing Skyrim and FO4 ss hardcore survival RPGs is the most fun i had with them. No fast travel, less carrying capacity, needing to eat, drink and sleep. Spent a lot more time planning out adventures, and just enjoying the game on a whole other level
Personally have enjoyed Skyrim survival ever since getting it on pc post-AE, even if cripples my beloved argonian warriors with the level of cold, but fallout’s has me modify its damages a little, since it functions as highest difficulty, unlike the toggle of Skyrim, so you you feel so frail to me personally if you don’t use power armor a bunch, with not enough damage from self imo to balance that, but yeah, really forces you to consider whether taking a piece of gear is worth it, depending on weight and such
Bro how did you never touch the alchemy station?? It’s so fun, once you start memorizing the effects of ingredients it changes the way you see the environments. Suddenly vast open areas become a treasure trove of potential tool components.
See, this is why I’ve never been a minmaxxer, I will deliberately make things harder or more time consuming if it is more fun to do it that way. I don’t usually fast travel, if the quest line is engaging then I turn back from glitchy short cuts and go the developer intended way, and I will turn down better quality armor or weapons if there is an alternative I prefer the design of.
It’s a game, you gotta make your own fun and play it the way you enjoy!
Edit: the more I watch this video the more I realize I am maybe a freak. I love the smithing loop. I always make my own gear. I cannot fathom playing Skyrim without this part of the game….
I'm with you, Every potion I drink, an armor I wear was made by me and often with style choices in mind.
I like making my own armor and enchanting it to my preferences and making my own potions. I can't imagine playing Skyrim with only what I happen to loot. I have Borderlands 2 if I feel like playing a looter shooter.
As someone who LOVES Skyrim, vanilla and modded, I found your video pretty cool and your enthusiasm through-out it is inspiring to say the least.
IMO, all of Skyrim's vanilla systems are actually good, even Perk Trees I find useless on the long run like Lockpicking, Alchemy or Blacksmithing are actually good and meaningful.
But I think the one system that works against the game sometimes, especially those 3 Perk Tress, is the Looting. You're able to loot any armor from dead NPCs, which gets better with higher levels along with many items or consumables. As a result, as you play and level up, you overlook the need to level Lockpicking since you get TONS of lockpicks, so you can afford to fail or make mistakes on Master or Expert locks all you want. You also amass a lot of potions, hence no need to master Alchemy, and you get constantly equipment the more you kill or quest, so no need to for Blackmithing either. The loot system is the one mechanic that, while good, also contradicts or hinders the whole design of Skyrim, especially on the long run.
I don't like permadeath perosnally, but I can appreciate its value. I do like how Souls-like games handle the player dying though, and I think a more streamlined mechanic like that is a good compromise between saving-loading on death and Souls-like death.
All-in-all, nice video! I had fun watching it.
The key to your role play game has always been playing a role. In western RPGs like Skyrim, you are given as little as possible as far as background and descriptors and it scrubs away so much that it feels jarring to be told "yes, this _is_ the plot of the game" at points. Our _choice_ is insanely important to this game. We have thousands of opportunities in Skyrim to really tweak the role that is being played until we've basically built an extension of Nirn in our head with what you can do to further play with that choice you made. Not all the mechanics are good, but they're all perfect for a handful of SPECIFIC roles that someone can choose. The game released in 11/11/11, and it's October 2024-- I'm calling that 13 years of perfecting Skyrim loop mechanically and emotionally. We're stuck in our ways by now. Maybe if we put it down for a couple months and picked it back up, we'd remember who is actually in charge of what role we're playing here and who decided the millions of other ones weren't worth it.
7:55 lol... I did not realize people did not play Skyrim any other way than the one you describe discovering.
Me too lol. I loved mining and smithing and the alchemy 😂 all for the exact reasons he said too.
Makes me wonder how many people don't interact with these types of gameplay mechanics and then say a game is shallow.
Don't get me wrong, the classic Skyrim is wide but shallow still exists, but these gameplay mechanics add to the depth
Exactly! He makes it sound that this kind of play is revolutionary 😂😂
Yeah seriously😂
I'd always wondered why more people don't like Skyrim, low and behold it's because they didn't play half the game lol
@enochianbard9411
I considered Skyrim a sort of watering down of the popular CraftyBits mod for Oblivion. You know, back in the days when games came on... I am trying to remember if Oblivion was on DVDs or multiple CDs... There were some games around that time with two different releases because DVD drives in computers were not standard.
...
I was actually helping my friend at his arcade today and a guy had dropped off some old computers - some Socket FM2, AM2, and AM 3+ boards.... My car is also just a few years from being a classic, as well...
Anyway - people modded crafting into a game without crafting simply to go hack at different trees and boulders to build weapons they could just buy (or mod in to spawn somewhere random).
I am kind of hoping... Somewhat against all odds, that Bethesda somehow scraped together the ability to combine the fallout 4 settlement system and a proper speech and charisma skill trees to allow you to form a war band in the next Elder Scrolls.
It's asking too much, I imagine - but a guy can dream. Maybe I will have enough capital with my own business ventures in the coming years to start a studio and employ some good people to make what Bethesda couldn't - or at least make a good run at doing so.
Arena/Daggerfall/Morrowind said “master the deep mechanics or GTFO.
Oblivion said “master the deep mechanics and the game will be easier.”
Skyrim said “we have deeper mechanics, but you can just wander freely if you really want to.”
Skyrim has a false shallowness that hooks noobs who know little, disappoints those who loved the older games, but will be surprisingly deep if you engage with it on its terms. It just won’t force you to do it
This. Thank you for putting into words what I've been unable to 🙏
TIL I've done a mostly Iron Man playthrough of Skyrim (minus the looting restrictions, and not using starting spells) by preference and not as a challenge.
Also, great video, of course. I always like it when UA-cam video essayists can admit when they are wrong and are able to back it up with points. It shows an ability to introspect and learn and grow.
Reminds me of when I tried an illusion only playthrough. Its really stupid but also fun. I had to run for at least 10 minutes just so a guard could kill a very stubborn bandit.
My favourite build is Illusion + Conjuration + Sneaking. First I make enemies fight each other, then if any survive I resurrect the dead to finish the living off. Meanwhile I hide in the shadows and watch the mayhem. It's a terrible build whenever 1 on 1 is required, it's terrible for defeating bosses and dragons, but who cares? It's so much fun.
Nothing beats the classic “play a better game” play through.
Never played Skyrim in any other way since then
@@communistcomputergod6449 are you a pizza cutter? 'cus you're all edge and no point
This video inspired me to play Skyrim again for the first time in almost 10 years it's been some of the most fun I've had playing games in a long time. I usually can only play something for an hour and then get bored, but I've dropped 8 hours straight and I'm on my 12th character following the ruleset and every time I die, I just want to try again. I don't remember much from when I did play so everything feels fresh or is like a foggy nostalgic memory. So, thank you for making this and inspiring me to have probably my best gaming experience in the past couple years.
For my very first playthrough, I chose to play a character that would not cast spells. Shouts, enchantments, alchemy all on the table, but no magicka. Most of the play experience you're describing was my (unintentional) introduction to Skyrim. I also stopped using bows when it got too repetitive, and when I got the 15x damage for sneak attacking with daggers I was all-in melee stealth assassin. I cleared a fort one time like it was Assassin's Creed, undetected and one-shotting wveryone, and it remains the single most fun encounter I had playing Skyrim. I watched their routes, I prepped gear, shouts, poisons, and potions. And I cackled everytime the throat-slit kill animation played for a dagger sneak attack kill.
Thank you for bringing these memories back. Now I'm off to reinstall Skyrim.
I love Bethesda alchemy, both in Oblivion and Skyrim. I’m glad that you got to experience it
Oblivion's alchemy was really overpower once you got to 100
@@DieWitnessI mean, If you get to 100, it should be overpowered.
If you want broken, then try morrowind alchemy.
Most of my Skyrim runs I don't fast travel. I even ran a fast travel disabled mod. Having to walk everywhere gives you a better immersion into the Skyrim world.
I like this video very much, because its contents truly surprised me. I discovered Skyrim way late (2018) and started playing it on my Nintendo Switch (yes, you read that right), without mods and all that and today I have well over a 1000 hours .. I kind of played by myself since most of my friends don't really know or care for the game, but I never struggled with being entertained because I automatically did all of the things that you mentioned you were missing out on. I got married and chose a nice home that my spouse liked.. I used a lot of alchemy because I was already picking up everything I could find in terms of ingredients naturally.. so it just made sense to use them. Not even just for buffs and effects, but also for money. I sold nonsensical potions that made a lot of money! I used bound weapons to fill the soul gems I had found on my travels and slowly leveled enchanting on the side.. I always considered it roleplaying. And shouts?! Honestly I'm wondering what you have been doing in your games, if you haven't even used those.. just for the sake of collecting them all to see what they do, whether useful or not, is fun to me..😊
Thanks Todd Howard.
But seriously, being along for this journey has been genuinely revolutionary in how I see this game, even though ive spent a good 50% arguing why Mjoll the Lioness is better than Aela of Companions fame. Absolutely delighted to see this video come out, especially knowing the fact that 30 minutes cannot possibly sum up the effing ODYSSEY the streams have taken us on. To many more years of Skyrim, cheers!
If it makes you feel better, I think I’ll be marrying Mjoll in this next run. I was going to marry that woman Morwen in the Skaal village, but there’s something to having your spouse follow you on adventures
Honestly man, it was such a blast having you guys along for the streams. It was a huge part of me deciding that going live should be a routine part of my work schedule going forward. I've got a lot more I want to do with Skyrim still, and then a lot more I want to do with other games still. Excited to see you around for it all.
@@ThaneBishop In one of your recent streams, you mentioned that you would potentially be interested in a highly-modded playthrough later on. I've been playing Gate of Sovngarde lately, and I get the feeling that you might not like it. I've found it too much for myself, and we seem to like similar mods in some aspects.
Would you be interested in a curated mod list? I'm working on one for myself and I could make a version for you, with your feedback and even community input.
R&D Department rise up
I would literally still have Rockjoint with the R&D team
8:47 I really hoped you were gonna announce that Transmute was your gateway drug to learning about the benefits of cooking and the almighty ELSWEYR FONDUE.
Never cooked, I always saw it as useless, why would I cook, which means hunting, something I don't do; when I have potions
@@elmine7707 The reason would be 25 pts of magicka regen *per second* :)
@@reeven1721Jesus Christ, I've barely engaged with cooking in 12+ years of skyrim but maybe I'll start another playthrough as a mage chef. 25pts regen per sec is insane.
@@reeven1721Holy Macrol 25 mana/s, that's insane. Me an damsco bouta have a whole new play style
Always did a Khajiit, always ate fish... then I noticed I could cook Elsweyr fondue with what I was "borrowing" from people
I have gone out of my way to make it since
This is adorable in seeing someone recognize the reasons why this matters. I just have such a huge aversion to death in games that I played like this, but others rarely seemed to get it.
This is what happens when an entire generation grows up without true roleplaying games to demonstrate how they're SUPPOSED to be played.
Sounds like you don’t know how to play role play games. These people can play a role play game how they want. I have made 1000s of potions but outside of health potions I don’t know how many I’ve actually drank. Usually just sell them. Smithing is almost completely neglected for me.
The fact ur saying how someone is SUPPOSED TO play a game is just a dumb oppinion and i hope ur being sarcastic or rage baiting cuz if not. Your oppinion is stupid
Yeah I find it really crazy that this video is just half an hour of "Oh wow, I'm actually playing the game as intended"
@@DynamiteProdYeah, no. Just because people CAN play games however they want, doesn't mean they know how the game is SUPPOSED to be played.
It's like watching a 5yo "play Minecraft" by flying around in creative mode pouring lava on cows. Sure they're having fun and engaging with SOME of the game's systems, but they're not really "playing Minecraft". They're playing WITH Minecraft - and that's the difference.
People who "play RPGs" by only doing what's most effective/efficient are missing the point. They're playing WITH RPGs, not playing RPGs. RPGs are sandbox games that give you the tools to craft your own story - that's the point. That's why these games are made. And if a generation of gamers came into Skyrim not understanding what that point is, or that it even exists, they're going to experience it differently (and likely worse) than people that know better.
Imagine thinking of Minecraft as "the game where you pour lava on cows". Maybe you'll see my point.
@@NoeLPZC This point your're making, that everyone in these comments seem to be making, is ridiculous. Do you not think there is a reason why a game like Skyrim needs a weird gameplay approach while other rpgs don't in order to be enjoyable? The gameplay systems in skyrim are just extremely imbalanced, and fixing it with gameplay limits is both unintuitive and immersion breaking. You expect people to just give up looting just so that crafting doesn't feel completely useless? And how does doing that make sense in the world? You can ignore all the stupidly abundant potions in vanilla skyrim if you want but you will never not know that they're there and that it's unimmersive. So why make yourself do these silly content creator challenges when you can literally just balance everything with mods so you can interact with ALL of the gameplay systems instead of ignoring half of them?
2,000 hours + in skyrim from release (mostly 2011-2016ish). Unmodded. Was my favorite game for a long time and is still in my top 5. I don't think it needs mods.
It doesn’t need mods but they are very nice..
Although I mostly play Skyrim VR now and Mods are Required for that
This reminds me of why I really loved Skyrim back in the day. If you invest in the world, in it's mechanics, it rewards you with a world to live in. I had forgotten, in the ensuing 13 years.
Making your own rules is one of the best things about this game. My favorite playthrough was one were I did, no crafting, no magic, no fast travel, turn off autosave so saves could only happen in safe places like inns and your homes, and no glitches/cheats to build up levels. Enchanted items, potions and scrolls could be used only if found. It really slowed down the game and it was probably the playthrough that I spent the most time and found/did the most things organically. My map was full. I only died a couple of times. I became very cautious because of the, sometimes, long periods of time between saves. It also forces you to carry fewer things so you won't become overburdened in a bad place. The only mods I had were some visual stuff and a wild life one. I had a few other rules but those were the big ones.
the fact that Skyrim is an action adventure game with RPG mechanics and not an RPG game with action adventure mechanics explains most gripes people who dislike it have with it imo
Precisely, and rightly so because the series used to be RPG
@@DedicatedAngler I don't think Morrowind or Oblivion were RPG's either. All of these games are adventure games, you don't make meaningful decisions in Morrowind or Oblivion, the only decisions you make are what factions you join and what quests you complete. But there is no ending slide where because you joined House Telvanni they became the most powerful great house. The questline is just over.
Personally, I think that's fine, these have always been adventure games, games where I create my own story and my own fun, I join each faction and do each quest based on what my character would do. But these games have never been RPGs and I hope they never are, I want them to stay as exploration games. Give me my sandbox, fill it with weird shit and I'll have my fun.
@@Alex_Of_Astora You're absolutely right, Oblivion in my eyes was the nail in the coffin for the Elder Scrolls series as a RPG. I guess there's always going to be contention as to what makes an RPG vs a CRPG/ARGP/Whatever, but, the fact that combat uses dice rolls in Morrowind is a clear indicator of the series roots as a proper RPG.
@DedicatedAngler what kind of definition of rpg are you even using as it would remove far too many games from the early ages of video games to be a viable definition?
@@burningbronze7555 whys that a problem? I dont really understand your point. RPG statistic driven, character progression, looting all that good stuff. Games that encourage player agency and experimentation.
Which of these games are RPG in your eyes?
Zelda
Diablo
Skyrim
Pro evolution soccer
ive always liked how self sufficient you can be with alchemy. most ingredients can be collected yourself and learning the best ways to do so is always fun. wading through sunken ships for barnacles, raiding people's houses for garlic, yelling the first word of either unrelenting force or clear skies at fish for salmon roe, mixing those three together to make the best alchemy power training potion in the game...its my favorite skill in the game
I always played like this, I even got a journal to write in character. Admitedly, you have to put a lot of effort into each gameplay to get anything done, but it is so worth it, it does feel like an experience. I'm happy to see other people enjoying the game like this too! There's a lot to do, and a lot to enjoy :)
I'm glad you had this experience of rediscovering the fun that can be found in raw Skyrim. I didn't really consider that people would play without using the crafting skills, especially given how they are arguably the strongest skills at high levels, but it's been enjoyable to listen to your story of finding value in them through a challenge run. I do like my fair share of mods and personally find some things a bit lacking for my taste, but Skyrim is a full game in it's own right and it's worth appreciating.
I've always like the idea of alchemy in Skyrim, even on my first playthrough the moment I realised i could pick flowers and mushrooms and use them to craft stuff that immediately became a compulsion to gather everything off the side of the road as I go from place to place. The potion crafting has always been interesting to me, even when not looping it with enchantment to create god potions. I've tried doing playthroughs where alchemy's my main skill, but so much of Skyrim is combat, and because the closest it gets to providing a combat option is crafting poisons that you either reverse pickpocket if you can or just apply to weapons for some bonus damage it tended to end up playing not much different from other character for me. As you mentioned the game world grows with you, and if you spec hard into non-combat skills that aren't stealth early on, I find it gets a tad off-putting because I'm basically a level 1 character with Alchemy 50 in a level 10 world.
Smithing is something I always considered an inevitability because even if you don't go hard on it tracking the ores, any gear you have can always be improved by simply having a sufficiently superior smithing skill. Unless you're going full mage with enchanted clothes and no weapons, any character setup will have something, from a dagger to full daedric armour, that can be improved with smithing, and enchantment ends up in a similar place since when you get a high enough enchanting skill you'll never find anything non-unique that can match you can make yourself. If anything the challenge for me is to not "optimise the fun out of the game" by limiting how much I allow myself to indulge in smithing/ enchanting.
It was one of the best sandbox exploration games I've ever played. Up there next to Subnautica.
Edit: Also, Alchemy and Enchanting have always been powerful. It's my favorite way to play these games.
I left a comment on your original video about Skyrim talking about how playing the game in different ways can enhance your experience, and I'm so glad that you're giving it a try!!
17:37 Well someone clearly never played Skyrim before...
One of the best experiences I had in Skyrim was a legendary and hardcore playthrough where I put every single point in stamina (I had about 3000 hours of playtime and thought leveling stamina as absolutely useless beforehand). Turned out it perfectly complemented my playstyle. I could sprint for ages, and traversed the map WAY quicker than I had ever expected. The added carryweight saved my hoarding gremlin ass sooo much running. Every combat encounter was like playing with fire because everything that was not a skeever could very well one shot me. And best of all, It made the obligatory stealth archer gameplay soo much more engaging, because if I was detected, I actually was in really REALLY big trouble for once.
Wow it's almost like if you choose to actually enjoy the game instead of nitpicking and doing the meta build, you actually enjoy the game 😱😱😱
Thank you so much for introducing me to this entire idea! I recently started a playthrough of Skyrim, where I am kinda roleplaying as best as I can, and I'm not rushing to all the good things that I could access. And I'm playing as a mage! Which means I have to be really careful about my health, as I haven't leveled that up at all! I took inspiration from you on not allowing myself to pick up potions from the world, so I'll need to craft them all myself, and I think I'll do the permadeath thing as well! I just have one oopsie daisy to make up for, which now has a very good punishment for that!
This video was a lot of fun.
Heads-up, but you're still wrong about Skyrim. Crank the difficulty up to Legendary. Play with no rules, but respect your own time. Don't bum rush things, prepare for them and kill them efficiently.
Player-made lingering poisons are busted. Fortify skill potions are insane. Smithing and Enchanting take a while to wind-up, but are incredible in the mid and end game. Staff of Storm Atronach from the Atronach Forge is both real work to get early and exceptionally rewarding. Muffle spells, the Impact perk, Potions of Invisibility, Vampirism, Lycanthropy are all killer. There is real scaling in Predator's Grace, Vampire Lords, the Lighting Storm spell is absolutely insane against dragons in particular.
Explore the economy. There is a crazy economic engine unlocked by Sadri at the College of Winterhold. Grelka in Riften is also an unsung hero of the Skyrim training economy. If you like permadeath, Blackguard Armour introduces another great risk/reward like the Staff of Storm Atronach above.
Mods are incredible, but you don't need them to have a tonne of fun in this game for a very long time.
3:58 same could be said about chicken.
Sure you could raise, kill, and rotisserie cook your own chicken(s), but is it worth the time and effort when you can just… buy an already plucked, and cooked bird from the store?
You can totally just get the ingredients for a health potion, but it’s just easier to get it from a store.
being in the streams, seeing most of your adventure, i understand this video on a whole different level
Love this video! I fell into deep love with Valheim for a lot of the same reasons your Iron Man run inspired engagement with all these systems. Very different style game, but the focus on the granular gathering and crafting mechanics and the appreciation it creates of the mechanical benefits you gain from your toils turns out to be my most addictive gameplay loop.
I did something similar with mining/smithing/alteration with my platinum playthrough. I had to get to level 50 which required leveling up a lot of skill that I never really utilized previously. I think I maxed out smithing and still have a couple levels to go so I just dawned some heavy armor and picked fights. 120 hours in total and it’s one of my proudest achievements
I fell in love with Skyrim when I did my first Legendary Difficulty run. You have to use everything you can to your advantage.
Now you're getting it.
So, basically you learned what the R in RPG actually stands for ?
It means creating a unique experience by engaging your imagination, and making conscious choices to shape (limit) your character.
So this makes me actually wonder how many people played skyrim with heavy manual role-playing. Like how these constrained playthroughs make people really work with the game's systems but with a justification like "my character is a pyrophobic khajit dragonborn" instead of a challenge/ruleset.
I'm a RPer from a bunch of 2000's MMOs before playing tesv too.
this video reminds me on my first playthrough and my current one. i always liked skyrim from the beginning. i played it a lot for hours and hours. but just now im coming back to it after years of it dusting away in my library with me taking a look at the cover every once in a while. then youtube decided its time for some skyrim RP videos. and god damn i loved them. applying some rules on yourself really brings the best out of this game and i didnt have to mod it that hard. my current character wouldnt need a single mod. just left some in for the sake of not having to disable a few mods that dont even alter the gameplay at all. and i fell in love. with the game, the universe its set in, the lore, everything. for the first time ever i was and still am fully immersed into skyrim. what a great game. and now excuse me, i have dragons to slay
Adopting a child is more important to this playstyle than taking a spouse. Mother's Love increases the impact of restoration effects. The increased XP just help you level faster, it doesn't actually impact character abilities.
I adore roleplay-centric runs with permadeath. I've done two so far, one as a hunter, and one as a paladin. Both led me to choosing wildly different playstyles, questlines, spells, and equipment. I didn't use anything that didn't "make sense" for that character. Thanks for bringing more awareness to this type of playstyle.
i hope tes6 will be more balanced, the big problem with skyrim is that its easy to gain money, loot, etc. Nothing requires that much work without putting a limit on yourself
IF it comes out (it won't)
@@111paolo2 At this point, for the better.
Isn‘t that the whole point why the game is great? If you want to be op early on, you can do it. If you don‘t want to be op, you don‘t use the op stuff. I think it‘s a benefit to the game, that it works like this. Very similar to Elden Ring if you think about it
@@Pluto-c4q i mean the problem is you gotta activly not use the shit the game gives you, it would be nicer if you had to go a bit out of your way to get the stuff, also same like fo4 it underminds the beggining weapons like pipe pistols when you so fast get a 10mm
You look Iron gear, and suddenly every bandit is wearing glass.
I love all this, I recently restarted Skyrim with this same idea and it is fantastic. One thing that struck me was just how much I cared about my horse of all things. The money that I had to get to purchase him, the travels we’ve had. I never cared about Skyrim horses beyond their mountain climbing glitchiness but under this playstyle the horse is a true, full blooded companion on this adventure. So glad you’ve rediscovered skyrim’s world view, wonderful video
Great video, for me the realisation was that it's insane that it ALL works to a degree. There's a bunch of shit most people won't ever touch, yet it's still there and worked out to at least be playable as you've shown here. That's what made it great for me, finding out that they put in the effort to make it viable!
It just works
I still remember my first alchemist run. It was thrilling, honestly. I remember going to the mines near Morthal for Imp Stool to mix with my Canis Root. There’s a pretty good early game combination for leveling I call the “Blues Brothers” ‘cause it’s just blue mountain flowers + blue butterfly wings. Obviously you can add wheat to that to make it even better, but crafting 15 or so of those by the time you hit Whiterun is a huge early game leveling boost. There’s a ton of blue butterflies in the fields east of Whiterun, too. Glad you had a chance to learn some of those same joys as I experienced. And yeah, go Joov, lol.
I can understand ignoring alchemy, I did a lot of it in Oblivion and Morrowind but also felt it wasn't necessary in Skyrim. Recently I did finally embrace it and found it's super useful. That said, you never got into smithing?! You can make weapons better than almost anything else in the game, especially if you max out enchanting.
I know its late, but, as he said in a comment, he mostly played stealth archer, so, why improve damage when already basically one shotting even on expert, and provides more than enough faction related armors from thieves guild or DB that you arent really required to devote time to making your own
that said, i feel you, on my first playthrough, smithing was probably first skill i maxed
I just started getting insane amounts of Skyrim content fed to me on UA-cam this week. This video made me decide to play it again. I haven't played in 4-5 years after 509 hours played on steam alone. Everything you mention is what I remember enjoying about the game most - slow, deliberate, and methodical gameplay. Thanks for the good video!
strong disagree, how tf have you played the game without using these systems
It's been so fun whenever I catch the streams and I'm glad they're continuing on for now! I've always liked to play games like skyrim with some amount of limitations, and lately I've been getting a lot better about treating encounters in games as life or death without formally setting a perma-death rule (I'd get too frustrated and never want to touch the game again, hah). I love these introspective videos. Excited to see where your run goes!
I never understood the whole stealth archer thing, my friends used to say “it does the most damage” but if you’re worried abt killing enemies quickly, just turn down the difficulty, and if you feel like your leveling up too fast get rid of the 3starter stones. Personally, anything that levels you up vertically isn’t really leveling you up when the game scales enemies to you, just have fun and use the mechanics as you wish. It’s probably why I never got bored of the game and hated the stealth Archer build bc it was slow and boring.
the other builds plain dont work. stealth archer is bad, but the other options are unusable
@@willywonka6487 my first three playthroughs were melee, two handed sword shield then stealth melee/dual wield, then did ranger (basically non stealth but still archer) and then mage, it wasn’t until someone mentioned stealth archer being broken that I tried it and then got super bored and never touched the class again
Yeah I never have the patience in a fight for stealth archer when I can just bonk my enemies with a mace
@@ThomasSchannel real
Crits feel good and 2x damage is nothing to scoff at
This is why this game is so great, my first play-through the only rule I set on myself is that I could never fast travel. I am glad I made that rule because this game is gorgeous and while it added untold hours to my play-through the immersion it developed in that play-through was incredible!
that note near the end about people in the livestream chat asking what mod your using for the ironman mode kinda makes me feel sad since especially with skyrim (but with gaming in general) most people seem to have lost their whimsy and ways of finding fun in the mundanity of a lot of games without having an external thing (like mods) placing that onto the game like random game modes i remember making up and playing with my friends on halo or gta when we'd just be in an xbox party and vibing
Self control makes single player games the most enjoyable. I love playing a legendary difficulty pure mage with no weapons or armor. You have to learn how to dodge attacks from two handed enemies early game or you die. I made the decision to delay the first dragon mission because they are deadly early on! It also removes the most over powered part of the game, smithing. Sure you can get the impact perk and enchant 100% reduction to destruction magic and stun lock everything, but against groups of enemies you still need a different plan of attack.
You used the west wing for the childrens bedrooms when the greenhouse can quadruple your potions production... And the top floor of the normal longhouse AND entryway house can both have beds (especially if you do not convert it into an 'entryway') Rookie mistake.
First video I've watched from you friend. Love this! I've only played Skyrim on Xbox 360. I still boot it up at times, it's such an experience. Limited but immersive. I laughed at times thinking how has he not done that, but when mods change the game fundamentally, it makes sense. I'm glad you were able to find new life in this wonder
Man discovers ROLEPLAYING!😂
When I went for the platinum in Skyrim I found a refreshing experience, many times I have started a new playthrough, many times I have finished those playthroughs, but after my first run, the others were always the same because I never bothered to get out of my comfort zone, I never cared about the dark brotherhood or the thieves guild, but the platinum run felt more like a journey than a grind.
For the 100 thousand trophy, I found myself making potions I could sell and taking bounties, and investing money into ingredients and arrows and whatever
The first half of it was made on survival difficulty too, so the stakes were way higher with the limited save
I also found myself wrecking havoc in all holds, breaking out of prison, fast traveling via wagons, collecting the daedric artifacts, etc
It was a really cool journey.
i see you finally found the role playing
I've done so many Permadeath iron man runs, modded and not modded. It's so much fun and has gotten me to keep playing, but it gets kind of scary when i don't need to look up anything. But i remember long ago when, after playing with mods for so long, that when i stopped using them and just explored the game, I had probably the most enjoyable time playing skyrim ever. This one event changed my view on gaming, to try and enjoy everything about a game instead of just focusing on the main quests or story. this helped me find games, that were originally unenjoyable, actually fun and worth my time.
My biggest takeaway from this video is that the biggest flaw with vanilla skyrim is ultimately the ability to get your hands on powerful resources *too* quickly, making a large number of really cool and interesting mechanics redundant and unnecessary outside of challenge runs like this one. It really does hark back to that quote "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" as said by Sid Meier. I could be wrong either in my understanding or my wording, but that's the way I see it.
I've long since beaten Skyrim's main questline, several times in fact. And yet, I still passionately play this beloved game. Mods let me recraft the world to suit my current game needs. I find great enjoyment in just roleplaying out various characters, none of which are the 'Chosen One'. Want to play a farmer? A beggar? A shop owner? A city Guard with a knee problem? I'm sure that a mod can help you experience that inside this wonderfully made world.
What would be interesting is if you can choose a religion that gives you a bonus, but prevents you from doing certain things like loot bodies.
Skyrim was kind of the first game I played after Rune Scape, lol. My family was very strict on what I could do with TV's and Computers and so playing Skyrim and even Runescape were a super no way, lol. (I bought a Gameboy Color with baby-sitting money and lived in terror that it and Pokémon Yellow would be taken, lol) So I played Runescape at school. Years later on my own with my own PC... I bought Skyrim because of a friend. So... grinding and walking everywhere was all I knew, lol. Honestly, not being able to play and then being able to do so? Yeah i went all in! While I didn't do Ironman, Standard was how I played, I found myself at level 60 with obscene amounts of money and spells! I was so bad at hoarding everything, lol. I still hoard but cups and cutlery are safe from my compulsive behavior! 🤣😂🤭
31:30 WHO ARE THESE BEAUTIFUL BABIES!!!
The kitty cats from the game Stray
A little spoiler alert, you won't see most of them after the prologue and until near the end. You still get oen cat
I have been an avid miner in Skyrim for 10 years now.
The transmute ore spell made me a fortune.
I even attempted a "millionaire" challange with only mining and smithing but vendors got on my nerves by never having close to enough gold 😂
It's a good day when Thane Bishop uploads
Do you know what attack animation mod he’s using?
Skyrim really clicked for me when I decided to play a Restoration/Illusion Mage. I used a mod to increase the number of companions and just kept them buffed and healthy for the whole run. Lucien became my bro for life.
I might not do the perma-death. But I love the idea of paying for a death with a whiterun to greay besrds delivery of 100 chopped wood. I was already one yo interact qith most of the systems in the game which are interesting, my biggest problem with Skyrim has been the lack of visual diversity and that quickly grinds me down.
Nah, even having to punish myself with like an hour of busywork for a death sounds ridiculous. I know OP might have all day to play games, but most people dont.
I've never care a little for reading complete books series that the game brings. I'm hoping that, at last, I'll be reading them to know lore and in the way bringing up historical related events to actually learn throught itself, I mean, a videogame.
Interesting, I always play primary crafters in Bethesda games.
Always cool seeing how other people play games. Like the archer is something that never appealed to me XD
Probably ties in to my enjoyment of the life sim aspect.
I love how people learn to not use fast travel in these games. I almost never fast travel in open world games. People beg devs for bigger more detailed maps and then when we get them, they just fast travel everywhere. I love actually having to spend the time to adventure through the land with all the interactions and stuff. It FEELS like you're really living in these worlds.
When I see any mod titled "Overhaul" I ignore. It's one person's preference.
Only mods I use on Skyrim is SkyUI, and more trees foliage in towns, better water... Basically visual for a 13 yearold game.
Starfield though... That needed a few more intensive mods... And even then it's no Skyrim.
SkyUI is just one person's preference for UI, but you still use it anyways.
@@maynardburger Not really. It makes the UI more practical. Where as "combat overhaul" and "wildlife overhaul" are generally an individual's belief that the player should have more health in combat, or maces should do more damage because they watched the history channel one time, or wolves shouldn't hunt in packs because they heard it on a podcast. The SkyUI makes the UI more practical as it was designed for 1 button click on a controller, and on a TV from across the room, completely ignoring keyboard and mouse users. If they had bothered adding a proper inventory and UI for keyboard/mouse players using a monitor, then the UI mod wouldn't be needed.
It was so fun to watch the streams, even though I usually missed them when they were live. Keep it up!
I agree that restricting yourself can make the game much more engaging, especially with mods to restrict you, but I'm not sure I'd personally say that's enough for me to say the game is better. In the same sense that nuzlocks are really fun, but I don't consider them when I'm trying to judge the quality of a pokemon game
Relaly enjoy this vid. had a very similar experience this past summer. Decided I'd be a wood elf two hander and stick to survival difficulty. Really made me use the things in the game and finally interact with it in a way that isn't "quest marker simulator". Felt good. might pick a different build for a winter play through.