after just one week i've come around on this game's relentless handholding. there is absolutely a place for this in video games, and it's when you're feeling particularly tired and brainfoggy but can't remember if you've taken your ADHD medication and so a not-too-involved RPG is all you feel capable of doing today

trucking along with the main quest now. i don't know if i'm just overleveled and that's why it happens, but i love after every quest having to leave the storycave where i get my storyquests from the storyguy while he "figures out our next move", and not being called back until i set one foot in another town

i started to get bothered by all the story-specific books and journals i'd see sitting around during quests that i would have to either drop everything i'm doing to read, or never read at all because i couldn't collect them. but i figured i must be "collecting" them in some way because they glow yellow if they're unread, so i looked it up and apparently if i do some quests at the Mages Guild i can retroactively see them all? sweet well i just finished a main story quest so i'll head over into town to do that instea--

man!!! oh well that's where i'm going at least

ahh finally i can read these

the game gave me a lootbox as a level-up reward. luckily i have the "never use valuable consumables just in case" RPG-player gene so i have a reason to ignore what i got besides the ick factor. something about the way this game presents the lootbox menu is jarringly slimy. how my character disappears and the Lootbox Mascot takes their place to greet me, for some reason i expect an Elder Scrolls game to handle its exploitation more tastefully

yes about the soul no about my name being Vestige, i just let people call me that so they can stay fully voice-acted

this is Cadwell my favorite guy from Elder Scrolls Online. from the first time i met him i thought ok, so this is the one character i will probably care about in this game and the rest will either only show up for two quests or have their entire personality be spouting fantasybabble (jury's still out on this). thankfully he is voiced by John Cleese so i knew he would not be a two-quest deal and in fact be a safe bet, i'm all in i'm investing in Cadwell. he's just a wacky bloke. got a bloody pot on his 'ead he does

characters can't talk about the Elder Scrolls in this game and have me take it seriously because they always may as well be saying something like "the prophecies foretold in the Elder Scrolls, when read by mortal eyes, cause them to succumb to spending £8.99 a month for DLC access and expanded crafting storage..."

i beat the first big bad of the story and this is a very funny thing to say when your character model is dead still like this and immediately after i looted you for 19 gold

this is around the time it occurred to me just how easy this game has been? i'm using probably very suboptimal abilities and gear, not even following what the game suggests, and i haven't really had to try yet in a fight. and from what i understand pretty much the entire game is synced to your level now (in other words there is no point to levels), so either the syncing is poorly done, the gear i'm being given is maybe a good bit stronger than it originally would've been, or the game is just easy because it's an MMO and "difficulty" in MMOs actually means "how long it takes"

also i've been taking a lot of screenshots of big story moments just because i'm getting into it. but i can't use them and say much beside "i got to this part whoaa.. Ohh and this part's crazyy"

Whoaa

Pic of me w Molag Bal ^_^

one thing i will not forgive this game for is turning me into a monkey and making it suck. because i become monkey so i can fit into tight spaces, but the game forces me into third-person so i can see that i'm monkey, to prove that i have gone monkey, and the camera is too sensitive to collision, so in squeezing through those tight spaces it just rapidly switches between first and third-person. you know what i'm going in on the monkeypart of this game - as well as that, i simply did not stay monkey long enough. at first it seemed like it would be a fun monkey platforming monkeysection but that was not the case. i can assure you there is reason to stay monkey aside from just squeezing through holes. and no monkey noises? ermm are you effing kidding me? all-in-all this quest gets my lowest possible monkeyrating: "Bad". Do better, ZeniMax

i think the deal with this part of the game is doing a bunch of sidequests to populate a hellcity, and that they all involve big choices of some kind. here it was i had to either kill a catguy or someone who was not a catguy, which is obviously not much of a choice. a character did say something about every choice i make affecting the city in some way, which initially i doubted because it's an MMO

also i guess i shouldn't be doing just the main quest? because i run into characters you would encounter during faction storylines and they bring up events from those storylines, and i haven't even lined those stories yet! this game doesn't really seem to even try with keeping a coherent timeline - i ran into one of the main main-quest guys in a different place, wearing a different outfit, and talking about different stuff than the incredibly pivotal story events he was currently occupied with elsewhere. i was also confused about why all the most important people in Tamriel were mentioning the "tales of my heroic exploits" and the incredible reputation i have, when i've only been hanging with the main characters, doing low-profile sidequests and pickpocketing people. i get having the freedom of going where you wanna go but i think the research i''m having to do to not get the story out of order is more than it should be? this isn't just like if episodes of a TV show weren't numbered, it's like if episodes were made up of a bunch of different scenes from different seasons, and you had to know beforehand when to hit pause on one episode, then which part of a different episode to watch next