First Thoughts: Stepping Into Skyrim

I'm very excited to have finally gotten to try Skyrim, since all my friends really love it and I've been listening to the soundtrack and reading up on bits of lore for the past few years all without playing it. I had a pretty good idea of what I'd want to do once I got there, but it would take the actually getting there to give any of it a try. Curly got me Skyrim a few weeks ago, and I finally got around to trying it out just this weekend. I know I'm a little late to the party, but that's definitely not going to stop me from talking all about it.

I started off by subscribing to a few mods, since Curly suggested I mod up before actually playing. And so I did, choosing from some of the more popular mods instead of rooting around for specific things, since I didn't know exactly what I was looking for. I chose ambient noises, water and fauna quality, a few horse changes, eye aesthetic, and a few other things that I felt were cool without taking too much of a toll. Looking back, I definitely want to subscribe to the city livening-up mods that I saw, as well as improve the trees a little more. But for now, I've had no problems in play that are the game's fault.

Of course, I've gotten a fair helping of anything I would likely tag "Thanks, Bethesda" if I ever got around to showcasing Forge snippets from the game. I think it was in the first house I visited that I saw plates and utensils falling and floating around the place, and I just did my best to ignore them. Nothing that's happened so far has been of too much annoyance, and anything that's happened has just been funny.

Anyways, this is my first character, Elia Trelanus. She's a Breton that I'm hoping to turn into a fine mage one day. I suppose that'll take some work, and for now, taking a whack at everything with her axe seems to do the trick.

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Something that I've found that I've really liked was the quest-pointer mechanism. Along with a custom map marker and places of note, the navigation bar at the top of the screen easily tells you about where you're headed so that if you continue in the direction you're going in a more or less straight line, you can get to the place where you're trying to go just by keeping it in the center of the bar. It's to the point, doesn't require a map every few seconds, and is simple enough to grasp that I don't need to be constantly thinking about it when there's a chance I could get jumped by an animal on my way down a trail.

A few paragraphs back I mentioned that there are no issues in play that are the game's fault. Now that I think about it, there's one that's half the game's fault and half my own, and it's that I get very motion sick from playing. I've turned down the look sensitivity, but I can't have it all the way down because I need to turn quickly to fight faster enemies. So, I end up having to stop playing every half an hour and rest my eyes, at which point I get distracted or busy and can't return for hours. I dislike having such short playsessions, but I'll put up with it if I have to. I'm working on finding a solution, and the first one that looks really attractive is sitting further away from the screen and playing with my DS controller. I know I had a good time playing Transistor on my pillow throne, so I might try that again with Skyrim. As well, Tyrannodorkus pointed me to a method to change the FOV, so I'm looking forward to giving it a shot, seeing that FOV changes alleviated my issues with GW2. Updates on that and different remedies later, I guess!

by AllPurposePanda on Twitter - Elia Trelanus"she cute"

So, what are you guys playing lately? Any cool experiences from Skyrim? Or, what games make you motion-sick, and how do you deal with it? Let me know, let's have a chat.