Doing All the Things: Skyrim Edition Pt. 6 - Doing All the Things Was a Terrible Idea

Sometimes I wonder just how much initiative the average inhabitant of Skyrim has. Sure, they get up, got to work, and stop by the tavern on their way home before turning in for the night. However, when they have some sort of problem they come running to me for help. I can't be bothered to count the number of times I've been asked to retrieve something from some ruins, deliver a doodad halfway across the realm, or deal with the town drunk. Surely these people can do at least some of these things on their own. It's enough to make me wish one of the perks in Speechcraft was Motivational Speaker. Then I could ditch my armor and bow, dawn my finest clothes, and embark on a tour of self improvement, encouraging the locals to better themselves, and not just pester the first adventurer they see to do the work for them. Who knows. Maybe it would catch on, and a century or two later some thief would be stealing one of my self help books from a local noble along side copies of The Cake and the Diamond and The Lusty Argonian.

This first occurred to me after finishing the last of the guild quests and I took a gander at my journal. The laundry list of things to do was staggering. Just skimming through all of the tasks, very few were jumping out at me as looking particularly entertaining. I'd already been sent on more than enough fetch and / or delivery quests, been asked to do something about the local drunk, or help one guy find some other dude. After well over 100 hours of this during this particular playthrough, I was beginning to feel quite sated on what Skyrim has to offer.

Apocrypha is pretty trippy.

Maybe it isn't such a good idea to try and "do all the things". It certainly wasn't for me. Doing so just emphasizes the sheer amount of filler that the game has in terms of quests. I know games like to put the player at the center of the action, being the one getting things done, and helping people with their woes, but there has to be a limit somewhere. With everything else going on, especially with the main quests, helping the guilds, and run-ins with daedric princes, I slowly felt like I had bigger fish to fry rather than deliver something to a person on the other side of town, or on the other side of the kingdom. Don't these people know about couriers?  I've had my fair share come up to me with a letter. I'm sure they do parcel delivery as well. The town folk should stop being stingy, cough up the gold, and hire one of these people instead. For more difficult tasks that require clobbering bandits, maybe they should think about enlisting the help of the Companions. Then again, if they do that, Farkas would probably just foist the assignment on me the next time he saw me, especially if it involved spiders. Jerk.

So, what's an adventurer to do? Start tying up loose ends and push toward the end of the game, that's what. Deciding I'd had enough of relatively uninteresting, tacked-on side quests, I figured I would finish the Dragonborn expansion's main quest, sort out the civil war, become jarl of every hold in Skyrim, then push through the main quest, figuring out why the dragons were coming back, and hopefully put a stop to it. That seemed a reasonable list of things to do, it would most likely have some decent narrative, and be a fair bit more interesting than most of the side quests I had sitting in my journal.

Final showdown with Miraak.

Sailing into Solstheim, it was hard not to be struck by a little bit of nostalgia. Morrowind is by far my favorite Elder Scrolls game, so visiting this town brings back a lot of memories. From the architecture to the use of songs from that game, it's like being transported back in time. I spent a good amount of time just chatting with the locals, almost entirely comprised of dark elves. It was a bit odd being called an outlander given that I'm a dark elf as well. I'll just keep telling myself it was because I was wearing that Nightingale mask, and they couldn't see my face...

Tackling this bit of DLC was quite different from doing Dawnguard. While that was a very structured series of quests to stop a vampire prophecy, and actually takes a decent amount of time to get through, Dragonborn's main quest felt quite short by comparison. Granted, you do get an entire island to explore if you like, but it's not mandatory, and I was really in no mood to venture too far off the beaten path in my pursuit to get things done.

For such a short quest line, though, it did have a lot of interesting characters to meet. There's an entire village of Skald nords that are integral in stopping Miraak, the big bad of the expansion, from returning to Skyrim. While the rest of the peoples of Tamriel are polytheistic, worshiping a pantheon of gods and goddesses, the Skald have their own religion, following the ways of the All-Maker, a singular god more akin to Judeo-Christian religion, though this being seems a lot less wrathful than its equivalent in our own world. The group's background may or may not have been shoehorned it. I have no idea, but it was an interesting change trying to move away from the traditional gods that have dominated Tamriel for thousands of years. It makes me wonder how the Thalmor, with their crusade to root out Talos heretics in Skyrim, would react upon learning of this group.

Visiting the past to stop Alduin.

It was when these remote nords told me to meet someone named Neloth that the real fun began. Well, maybe not fun, but for an arrogant, self-important wizard of House Telvanni (House Telvanni! ♥ ) he made surprisingly good company. Being a sucker for dwemer lore, having this guy come along while exploring some ruins was great, as he added a lot of color while wandering the place, rambling on about the city and its history while looking for an ancient black book locked away there. I also like to think that he was a bit of a good luck charm for keeping away Falmer because we didn't encounter a single one of them while in these particular ruins.

After finding the book, I had my second encounter with Hermaeus Mora in the game. I've never been a fan of this particular daedric prince, as he reminds me of a cross between Eeyore and a reject from a really creepy sub-genre of anime. I made sure to keep that to myself, though, as Hermaeus was willing to help me defeat Miraak. This required spending a bit of time in Apocrypha, a plane of Oblivion where all forbidden knowledge is stored. After running through countless tombs, forests, and ruins, this was a welcome change. The place has such a surreal, otherworldly feel to it the way there are books everywhere, coupled with a strangely organic quality. Of course, being in a land more or less made of books means that there are books all over the place to collect, and collect I did. By the time Miraak was dead, and I was finally back to the mainland dumping tome upon tome in my Big Chest O' Tomes at the homestead, I had 150lbs of the things on me, or whatever that unit of measurement is that the game uses for weight. Maybe it's in tons, who knows!

Meeting Ysgramor.

Expansion content out of the way, or at least the main bits of it, I set my sights on bringing the civil war to an end. These quests left me scratching my head on a number of occasions. While the cloak and dagger stuff they had me do made it feel as though I was contributing to the war effort, there were a number of times where I was asked to help assault a keep so that the Imperials could take it over and garrison troops there. When I got there I didn't even really need to do anything. Sure, I could fight and speed the event along, but the soldiers were able to manage on their own on these missions. It got to the point where I wouldn't even draw my weapon, instead just jumping around the perimeter of the fort, watching everyone else do the fighting. I felt like a useless class in an MMORPG that everyone brings along only for their aura buffs. When we marched on Windhelm, I did make an effort to fight, though, as I was eager to finish this quest line. The whole thing felt a bit under whelming, even the fight against Ulfric himself. Him and his steward were hardly a challenge, and both went down quickly. Tullius gave a couple of speeches, which were alright, I guess, but the only thing I thought after Ulfric died was, "Well, I guess the rebellion is over." There was closure, but I was expecting more, but instead got a very anti-climatic ending to one of the biggest, most important story arcs in the game.

At least the final main quest turned out to be pretty good. There was a bit of meandering around with the Blades, trying to figure out just who or what was causing dragons to return to Skyrim, but once things got going it was a fun ride. Dragons do have a way of making adventures more exciting, and it was nice to start coming across some that felt at least a little bit powerful. Up to this point, the things seemed like fodder whose only reason to exist was to weigh me down with yet more bones and scales that I didn't really want, but couldn't help but to loot. With Alduin, he gave off an air of being top dog of the dragons what with having to use an elder scroll to figure out how to weaken him and make him vulnerable. His breath was one of the few to seriously take my health down in a short period of time, making me actually have to use high-end healing potions for a change. The highlight for me was going to Sovngarde for the final battle. While it may be wilderness with a big longhouse in it, the place is still the afterlife, so it was neat to meet some of Skyrim's most legendary figures, like Ysgramor. I was even more surprised to see Kodlak and Ulfric there. Usually games don't go through the trouble of reflecting that sort of thing, but here they were. It was particularly nice to see Kodlak what with all of the fretting he did over possibly going to Oblivion for being a werewolf in life.

Defeating Alduin once and for all.

When Alduin died, and the quest was finally over, it felt good. I'd done about as much as I could be bothered to with the game. Sure, it wasn't "all the things" as I had originally set out to do, but I'd spent more time, and done more things in Skyrim than I ever had before. Finishing the main quests in and of themselves left me pretty satisfied. I just wish the people of Skyrim at least tried to look like they cared about what had just happened. After killing Alduin and returning home, I talked to the Jarl of Whiterun and he didn't even make a mention of it, instead being all, "I've got a city to run!" Not even a peep, nevermind he helped me catch a dragon so that I could find Alduin in the first place.

But at least the main quests are over. There are still those tiny side ones I could do, but I'm not really all that compelled. With over 100 hours played, and having done the big, important things by and large, I'm pretty happy with the time I've spent in Skyrim, What I'm most happy about is actually finishing the game, or at least "finishing" it, since there isn't a hard and fast ending to it, no credits role, with a message telling me how awesome I am for saving the world, just some closure to some pretty big quests. At this point, that's enough, and for the first time in many years I feel that I can finally bid farewell to Skyrim, uninstall it, and move on to something else.

Other Installments of Doing All the Things: Skyrim Edition

- Part One: Getting Started
- Part Two: Picking Sides
- Part Three: Of Werewolves and Vampires
- Part Four: The F Words
- Part Five: Parenthood
- Part Six: Doing all the Things was a Terrible Idea