Damnit, Skyrim

[Or Damnit, Elder Scrolls, really...]
And now for a videogame-blog to get away from the seriousness of the last one... Minor spoilers in paragraph three.
So, I got The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim when it came out and proceeded to play it obsessively for a few weeks. Immediately I was pleased with several improvements, particularly the much better appearance of all the characters, both NPCs and the player. I probably spent an hour just making my first character, looking through all the options and tweaking things. I do so love creating characters...

The game had other improvements, of course. Some to make it more realistic. Naturally, though, the unrealistic things in the game are sometimes the best parts. It is quite common in Skyrim for adventurers to barge into the Jarl's room at 3AM and initiate conversation while he's asleep only for him to immediately jump out of bed and thank them for killing some bandits. Putting a bucket on someone's head is an excellent way to avoid attention whilst stealing everything in sight. I frequently assassinate important political figures in full view of their guards only to hear them remarking that it must have been their imagination as I walk away, possibly looting the corpse on the way out. Not suspicious at all, of course.

The only unfortunate thing about this game in my case is that it seems to be falling under the same curse that Oblivion had for me. And that curse is called I make a new character, explore for a while, do the Dark Brotherhood quests, and then make a new character again. Unlike Oblivion, though, I have actually completed a large portion of the game this time. I've almost finished the main quest line and I've finished all the side faction quests, but I'm at the point where I want to keep doing the Dark Brotherhood quests again because they're so much fun. I just seem to like abusing all the stealth mechanics in these types of games. The best moment in the game for me so far was meeting the emperor while on a mission to assassinate him; he was quite a reasonable fellow, very polite, too.

Just briefly speaking with my favourite assassin companion.

Despite my problem getting through the entire game, I'd highly recommend the game to RPG fans. I feel like it's less story driven than a game like Fallout: New Vegas, but it is so ridiculously open that you can really get a sense of immersion and just do whatever you want. The music is outstanding. Really. I sometimes just walked around at night to listen to the music. The graphics are much improved from the last Elder Scrolls game, and definitely improved from New Vegas as well. I can't wait for a new Fallout game on this updated engine...