A Game A Day (For A Year)—Part XXXI

For a long time, particularly when I was unemployed, I played Skyrim at least two hours every day, spiking to "more than half my waking hours" at times. I would reach a stopping point ... and then keep going. I would stay up late playing, blow off household chores, and put off meals. I even got my wife hooked, and she partook maybe even more than I did. I was up to level 54, and showing no signs of stopping.

What ultimately stopped me was a series of bugged missions. That was my wake-up call that maybe I needed to take a break, and taking a break gave me the clarity to realize just how much time I'd spent in Skyrim—and more importantly, that it was all too easy for me to get sucked into marathon sessions that quickly turned into binges. And although it pained me, I took the game out of my Xbox and put it on the shelf. That was in early 2013.

But I had to surrender my one-year chip this past weekend, because after more than twelve months without Skyrim, I fired it up again for a couple of hours. Then, after coming back from dinner, I handed the controller over to my wife, and she played for about four hours.

I think that the big reason we get so absorbed in Skyrim—aside from the fact that it's a really great game—is that there's always something to do, but not in that "on-rails" way common to so many shooters. The map is full of locations to be explored; virtually every area has some resource you can collect; there are random monsters wandering around everywhere outside; your actions generate encounters in towns; dragons occasionally drop out of the sky to challenge you; there are Words of Power waiting to be discovered and unlocked; and you can craft weapons and armor, brew potions, enchant items, and even cook food.

A lot of that activity goes on between adventures. You clear a bandit-filled cave, lug the hordes of treasure back home (which can require several trips), then spend hours of game time sorting it into stuff that you'll use, stuff that you'll craft with, stuff that you want to keep as trophies, and stuff that you'll just sell. You spend hours crafting, not because you need the gear you make, but because crafting improves your skills, and you can unlock new branches on the skill tree…and level up. I personally spend so much time on this part of the game that I think of Skyrim as an inventory-management game with occasional moments of action.

The action is worth it, though, and I have sometimes loaded up Skyrim just to go looking for a fight. Oddly, not usually a dragon—despite dragons being a major part of the story—but bandits. It's because fighting bandits, particularly when I have a bow, make Skyrim feel more like an open-world fantasy version of Rainbow Six.

Dragons, on the other hand, even though they sometimes show up in towns and villages at random, are maddeningly hard to draw in close enough for my best weapons and tactics. I can't count how many times I've thrown spells at dragons flying by, only to miss and have the dragon completely ignore me. And I lost dozens of arrows shooting at dragons that were flying past just a little out of range. I couldn't reliably count on fighting a dragon until I learned to aim dragon shouts at them—and that's problematic when you're in towns, where the guards get touchy about that sort of thing. I end up fighting the guards while I'm fighting the dragons, which is a bit counterproductive. Hell, I've had them get in the way of my swing, then go after me for "attacking" them.

The reason I picked up the Skyrim needle again this week was that a discussion about the highlights of Elder Scrolls Online brought it up, and a co-worker claimed that those bugged quests weren't actually bugged. "Those items you're supposed to be collecting? They're still in the game. So if you can figure out where you left them, you can retrieve them, then finish your quests."

As usual, the addiction lies to you to get you to come back. As it turned out, he was wrong on all counts: The one item I was supposed to be picking up was not where the game insisted it was (in a locked chest in a cave), although its guardians had respawned. And the item in question was actually in my inventory—but the game wouldn't let me hand it over to finish the quest, but wouldn't let me drop it, either. The other two bugged missions were about killing bandits and collecting bounties—but I'd already killed the bandits, so the "still in the game somewhere" theory wasn't holding up there at all.

My wife's game had similar bugged missions, and though we both tried to track down a way to finish them, it didn't look like it was going to happen. That led to a discussion of deleting our existing characters and just starting again—although there's no guarantee we wouldn't get those missions and find them still bugged with the new characters, too.

But the idea of starting afresh is still surprisingly appealing. I was never quite happy with the look of my character, or the name, and having seen 54 levels of gameplay and most of the map, I now know what sort of racial abilities would best serve my play style.

And then there the little matter of my dead companion.

Early on in my first game—but still far enough into the game that backtracking to a previous save would've been tedious—I took my first companion, the good-natured Lydia, off into the woods to explore. We encounter a trio of witches, and brave Lydia charged into the fight. She didn't make it, and it had been a long time since I'd saved. I knew that I could reload to when she had last been alive, but then I'd have to trudge back through the woods again to find those witches (and hope I didn't stumble into their midst, like last time) and defeat them again without getting Lydia killed. With a heavy heart, I decided that the time and effort is put into getting there was worth more than Lydia's continued existence in the game, so I looted her corpse and moved on with my life.

But it's always bugged me. I was new to the companion interface, and I'd like to think that I wouldn't make the same mistakes again. Now I know that dismissing a companion doesn't make them go away forever; they merely go back to your house and wait there for you. Or you can tell them to wait for you wherever they are at the time, and they'll just stand there until you come get them. I can bring Lydia back to life just by starting the game over again—and I can keep her alive by not making rookie mistakes!

Okay, I may be a little obsessed.

I think it's inevitable that I'll start a new character in Skyrim, but knowing that I'm likely to get engrossed in it all over again, I might have put it off for a while. Otherwise, I'm liable to spend all my spare time trying to catch up to where I've gotten with my current character—and I've already got ongoing obsessions with Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, Batman: Arkham Origins, and State of Decay.

Don't look at me like that. I can quit anytime I want.

8/3/14: * FTL (Subset Games)

8/4/14: * State of Decay: Breakdown (Undead Labs)

8/5/14: * Fallout: New Vegas (Obsidian Entertainment)

8/6/14: * ZMR (En Masse Entertainment)

8/7/14: * Merc Ops 2 (Yingpei)

* ZMR (En Masse)

8/8/14: * 8/7/14: * Merc Ops 2 (Yingpei)

* ZMR (En Masse Entertainment)

* Blood Bowl (iOS, Games Workshop)

8/9/14: * Skyrim (Zenimax)