zephie's game journals
so as it turns out? "completing" an area does not include sidequests! i was still running into them and they weren't even being marked on my map!! they kept a little discovery in this game isn't that wild. RPGs should not encourage you to do every little morsel of content, much less track it all for you to remind you of what's left. imagining if Minecraft had progress bars for finding every diamond in a chunk with a reward for completing it. wasn't that exhausting just to read
unfortunately the sidequests themselves still leave little discovery. here's a treasure hunt where most of time completing a step was a surprise to me, because i'd just be walking around trying to figure it out and i'd suddenly get the big checkmark for being in the right general area, then unlock the next hint. but also i looked back on the actual hints it gave and even after knowing where i was supposed to go i did not see how i would have figured most of it out. this sucks too because so many quests have little notes and journals scattered around that are obviously written to be usable in figuring out what to do naturally, but what's the point when a quest to find four items hidden across an entire region immediately tells me exactly where they all are on the map. playing this like an RPG isn't going to get me to endgame faster
tomorrow is the first day of the second half of the year and i got up way late today among other excuses, which means i'm putting off the whole "getting my life together" thing for today and just Gamin baby. recently i've been thinking about the concept of a "main game" that people have with MMOs and how much that may have affected my attitude towards playing them. logically i think it's stupid, subconsciously i feel like there might be something to it considering these are designed to be forevergames and you are a fool if you think you have time for more than one. but i can just play this game for a couple weeks, feel done with it and that's fine right. you know like any other video game. that's also the best thing to do so as not to have my opinion warped to "it's boring and suck's" because i played it for 1000 hours. i guess the lesson here is MMOs are bad and you shouldn't play them
returning lost instruments to the baaAAAHHHhrds guild
so as it turns out! the actual start of the main quest was i guess, pushed a little further in, in a recent update. the start of the game that establishes the whole plot and why you are here, where you go from being dead to not-dead in Tamriel. whereas now you start the game and are alive and just confused in Tamriel with seemingly no purpose but inexplicably have "chosen one" traits, e.g. "i've never seen someone able to control the power of the crystals like this...!" and then after a while you suddenly are killed, brought here and then unkilled. this also might be the time to confess i tried this game briefly years ago, and this whole starting quest did seem familiar when i realized i was meant to start here
this scene is accompanied by big-skyshard-exposition at a very tense moment, and i can't help but feel the word "collect" should not be used here in dialogue (also you don't even really collect them you just slurp up their glowiness)
[waking up] Aughhg..! what is this place... and what is this strange vision telling me i have 100% completion in it
and this is the second quest. no prophet of nothin contacted me about anything the quest just randomly started. going to assume this retroactive timeline tomfoolery was not handled too well
i was invited to da Dark Brotherhood and i have to kill a random guy for no reason. luckily being wanted ain't no thing in this game because you can immediately fast travel to an outlaw hideout and have it cleared for cheap. it also goes away on its own quickly, i was superhot from breaking and entering into some dude's house and killing him, then i switched over to write this journal and now i'm an Upstanding Citizen again. being sneaky and thievy is my favorite part of these games but i get it's easy to supremely screw yourself long-term with certain actions, and that just doesn't translate well to an MMO where you're expected to have everything accessible on a single character and you can re-spec your entire guy at any time
risking my hide trespassing when there was another player in here who'd already cleaned everything out
is that how they explain it
stupid cat opened a box of stolen goods in public now she's in timeout while she waits for her bounty to wear off, while i eat dinner