The Life of a Skyrim Mage | TES 5 Analysis

all right i'll entertain you a bit more if i have to it's under your feet land if i have it's under your feet land if i have it's under your feet land just follow if i have to it's under your feet land just yeah i bet i know you're a guy he's hiding out in the right way you might be wondering what's left to discuss about skyrim this game is probably only eclipsed by minecraft in the amount of hours of videos pertaining to it on youtube it's been out for over 10 years now and has been re-released and ported almost a dozen times well considering the main body of this first video in a planned series of four is over 82 000 words long there's still plenty to discuss this is partially due to the scale of skyrim partially due to the sheer amount of content that has been created for it since its release but mostly because after all this time i don't think a lot of people really get skyrim skyrim has become a cipher for many players a prism people love to stare into in order to see whatever aspect of games players and the industry itself they wish to receive if i want to believe that games as a modding platform is a valid model i'm going to mention skyrim if i want to prove big budget mainstream rpgs have been degrading in quality since the early 2000s i'm gonna mention skyrim if i'm going to make the argument that all good developers eventually turn into big money hungry conglomerates run by greedy callous bosses i'm probably gonna mention skyrim i believe a lot of what makes skyrim what it is has been lost in this discourse a lot of people other content creators especially have done this game a complete disservice by allowing the many external narratives surrounding this game to pollute their judgment of it now i'm not going to make grandiose claims that it's a super deep and intricate rpg masterpiece that rivals x game by y developer but i'm also not going to state that it's as shallow as i remember it being in 2011. if there's one word i'd use to describe skyrim it's inconsistent there are some parts of it that are about as bland as they come across at face value but then there's parts that really do have a lot more going on than many people give it credit for i believe a lot of skyrim's design was intentional and considering it managed to resonate with the audience todd howard had been wanting to reach i'd say the game is a success but i've only been able to come to these conclusions because i approached this game with the intent of figuring out what it is not what it could have been or what it should have been or what i remember it being but what it actually is this is why this video is over seven hours long and the next three videos are going to be lengthy too simply put you cannot cover skyrim completely in a three hour long video it's just not possible we're going to be talking about the main quest alone for three hours a little housekeeping then before we begin if you want to head straight to the video skip to the time stamp on screen or the next chapter of this video in the description below just know that i won't be answering questions that i'm about to address so if you want to avoid asking redundant questions about how this and the future videos are going to be structured and released you'll want to stick around through this short bit when i originally started this project back when the anniversary edition released i figured i could get through this whole game all of its dlc and some creation club hotshots in a seven hour long video the goal was to play through three different characters and have the video broken up into three distinct parts covering each aspect of the core skyrim experience magic combat and stealth turns out that was wildly optimistic so we are getting one video per character now with the dragonborn dlc and whatever i might have left to discuss being its own entire video because dragonborn is such a massive and important part of skyrim that it deserves its own dedicated video i don't know when those other three videos will be done this one took a little over two months to produce and that was with things going exceptionally smooth and no major rewrites or even any major roadblocks i don't even have the playthroughs for the second and third characters done so i really can't say what's going to be in those videos how long they will be or when it will be done i have some rough plans but i'm really taking this entire project one section at a time as a result this video is structured so that you can come and go as you please you can use the chapters to skip around and each video will be made so that they can be watched independently of one another they really are like a series of videos with their own self-contained theses personally i think the best experience is starting with the beginning of this one and watching it to the end and that's more than likely going to be the way the others go as well but i tried my best to make each part and each chapter as self-contained as possible as a result you will hear me repeat a point every once in a while because there might be some context i think is critical to the argument i'm making in that part just understand i did that for the benefit of those viewers skipping around speaking of viewing i'm taking a step back from my usual style of doing these videos and focusing more on the audio experience i know a lot of people prefer to just listen to these things so i'm going to be avoiding putting things in that will only benefit people actively watching if i do put up an important visual i'm going to call it out and describe the pertinent parts of it i got your back here passive listener feel free to throw me on some second monitor or put your phone back in your pocket if you have a comment i'm going to be honest i don't read youtube comments much anymore i just don't have the time to spread my attention out across so many platforms if you want to discuss things i really urge you to join my discord i got a link below and on my channel page if you want me to see it your best bet is posting it there i'm active most hours of the day and it will let us actually discuss things it's a nice place you might actually enjoy it if you watched my previous modded skyrim video this one is not a continuation of it i honestly don't think i'll be making a follow-up to rishika's story said to say had i known then when i know now about the discourse surrounding skyrim and the state of skyrim videos on youtube i would have made this video instead i was remiss in assuming there already was a proper deep dive analysis of skyrim on youtube already when i made that video which is why the format was all weird and it was modded this video is pretty much the replacement for that video if you've never watched it you're not really missing out on much trust me and finally i'm doing this playthrough on pc with the anniversary edition released november 11th 2021. i have two mods installed the unofficial skyrim patch and a mod that disables killcam animations because they were bugged after ae released and was ruining a lot of my footage the unofficial skyrim patch is probably going to be contentious for some viewers and rightfully so because it makes a lot of changes that arguably fundamentally alter the skyrim experience i will be bringing up the differences where the unofficial patch made a major change when it's irrelevant and when i'm aware of it but i don't have the entire change log for the mod committed to memory so i will be missing some stuff at alters i just felt these two mods were necessary though to make for an overall better video and that's why i had them installed everything else is vanilla and if you see something you don't recognize it's almost certainly creation club content and believe me there's a lot i have to say about the stuff added by anniversary edition but with all that out of the way i think it's time to get started our story begins with an imperial convoy winding its way along back roads to the village of helgen stuffed in the back of one of those carts was four men though being the [ __ ] that he is lokir gets booted out almost immediately leaving us with three we won't be discussing the civil war much in this part so alfred and railoff are going on the back burner leaving us with serion the high elf destined for true power but before we get there let's discuss his humble origins so skyrim makes it very difficult to role play oblivion was difficult enough with it foisting its chosen one plot on the player before they'd even ventured out of their prison cell but there was enough ambiguity with the details of the player's incarceration that it still worked well enough as well the character creation and class system allowed the player to create distinct and unique characters that clearly had some sort of life prior to being in prison skyrim bungles that up in a few key ways first we are given way too many details about our arrest we are told we were caught trying to cross the border from cyrodiil into skyrim so that means role-playing as someone already living in skyrim is out of the question you could make the argument the player character originally was from skyrim went down into cereal for a time and got caught trying to cross back but the story and a lot of npcs throughout skyrim will smell the outlander taint on the pc and state as much as well they're often way too ignorant of skyrim to be a native of it the reason for this is that bethesda wanted to start their story in medius res so they needed to come up with a reason to have a character like rayloft deposit his exposition onto the player great for building dramatic tension for the story terrible for role-playing options then we get to character creation and things deteriorate further with the removal of attributes classes and permanent birth signs the only thing that will differentiate different pcs will be their race and appearance the result being a mage high elf who barely possesses a greater aptitude for magic than an orc warrior racial abilities still exist and different races do have slight bonuses to different skills but all that's accounting for is each race's natural affinity for certain things that's not a reflection of the character's background skyrim gives the player the blankest of blank slates and that can work for a very small number of rps but if someone wants to play a character that's older than a literal child they're gonna have to come up with some really specific crap you see if serion had spent some of his natural 300 year lifespan studying magic he'd have some points in his magic skills if he'd spent that time as a farmer then he'd probably have some martial skills at least the skills in elder scrolls are meant to be an abstraction of a person's actual skills that is why they go up as a player uses those skills what the game is functionally telling the player is that the character lived such an inconsequential life prior to being touched by the plot but they just don't know anything so my task was to come up with a story for this high elf destined to be dragonborn and a powerful mage who manages to remain completely apolitical because we aren't going to be doing the civil war in this character while being a hugely famous public figure in a province embroiled in a civil war but he had to be a complete nobody with no experience or applicable training despite being a few decades old at least so what did i come up with meet sarrian the shop clerk after the thalmor purged his family and expelled them from the somerset isles he made his way all the way up to buruma where the sympathetic high elf owners of the general good store nova roma hired him to keep the shop clean and stock the shells as we all know retail is the most worthless of career paths if someone wants to develop marketable and useful skills he spent many years doing that and virtually nothing else explaining why he's got no skills outside of what his race is naturally gifted at eventually he grew restless and a little resentful towards cyridil and made his way north in hopes of putting as much distance between himself the thalmor the stagnant and dull imperial province and most importantly that awful city of burma you see siren didn't really like the thalmor but he really didn't like the nords after spending a few decades living among them sarin had only one impression they're all stinking barbarians so i head north to skyrim when he obviously hated the nords quite simple really was on the way to a better province he had hoped to catch a boat from solitude heading for high rock he could have gone by land through hammerfell but this being the fourth year and all that route was just not safe sure there was the insurrection in skyrim but from what he understood the empire was doing a good job containing the rebels and he'd only be there for a few days anyhow or so he thought all of that went out the window when he got to skyrim and realized the rebels were more of a problem than anyone in cereal had figured serion managed to stumble into the imperial ambush and in their infinite wisdom assumed that a high elf was with the rebels and tossed him in with the rest without so much as a trial he was judged guilty by a clearly racist imperial and the thaumore lackeys were of course nowhere to be found to correct this obvious injustice towards one of their own a hex upon your house imperial what in oblivion is that sentries what do you see [Music] after much running and burning sarian found himself at an unexpected impasse go with ralof who had demonstrated nothing but kindness towards him despite being ignored or go with hadvar an imperial lackey who hadvar he went with hatfar so into the imperial fort they went managing to escape the carnage sarian entered helgen a political prisoner and left something of a friend to an imperial soldier who was quick to promise the elf supplies and shelter not bad so onward they went the debate among players over these two is one of the many many things i find fascinating about the skyrim community personally i never gave it a second thought and would pick who i followed pretty much at random if i had no plans in doing the civil war i think i've done the civil war maybe twice so yeah some players would make the argument why on earth would you follow hadvar and side with the imperials when they were just about to chop your head off fair question but the counter argument is usually something like this why would anyone playing a nod nord and especially a non-human character follow ralof the stormcloaks are busy fighting a war to make skyrim a place for true nords yeah but you won't know that from this introduction alone unless railoff's damn elves line really tipped you off there's so much back and forth in this debate which would make you think choosing who to run off with is a binding contract with said faction it's not though the player can decide to join the stormcloaks after fleeing with hadvar and vice versa with the imperials and railoff but tez fans love to debate so i'm sure i'll be called an imperial bootlicker or something what i would have appreciated was a neutral option here where we can run off into the wilderness by ourselves looking at a map of helgen we can see here's the cart here's the chopping block here's the watchtower we run into with ulfric the burning houses and the gate tullius and the imperials are defending there's another gate here to the north undefended and i think it would have been neat if we could run through that undefended gate and head along this road solo ideally this would be the tutorial skip or at least a much briefer one compared to the fort with rayoff in hadvar which i'll be skipping in this video that road eventually leads into riverwood so the player naturally ends up on the main quest path anyways just without the civil war baggage maybe then someone will run up to the player seeing that they are a traveler and ask them to go to the yarl to get aid for riverwood because they saw the dragon flying off in the distance or something before we leave character creation behind i want to address the debate about multiple playthroughs in this game a very common criticism i see leveled against skyrim is that a single character can do almost all the content in the game a warrior character can run through almost everything including the factions for stealth and magic characters without much trouble and while this is a valid criticism against the structure of those factions and their quests i often see this being used to criticize character creation and the freedom skyrim offers players to do those things i don't believe this to be a valid argument though because this is assuming playing all the content in the game on a single character is the intended way to play skyrim i've heard it's said that bethesda wants their players to see everything there is in the game but i've never seen anyone at bethesda actually claim that and i don't think that's even a valid takeaway from how their games are structured when we get to talking about exploration we'll see how some parts of the map are often left unexplored by most players because nothing takes them there there are entire youtube channels whose whole thing is just exposing people to those hidden parts of the map that doesn't sound like something that should be possible in a game that's designed for players to see everything that's in it just because i can spend 200 hours on a single character clearing every dungeon completing every quest becoming thane of every city and becoming guild master of every faction doesn't mean that i should if looking at the journal is giving you fomo well that's a you problem while the fact that the journal doesn't let us hide stuff isn't doing anyone any favors that doesn't mean the journal is meant to be a to-do list it's perfectly fine to end a character after 40 hours with a journal loaded with quests and a map full of quest markers if you're compelled to do multiple playthroughs odds are you aren't being compelled to play through the main story again wondering if it's going to turn out any different whenever i want to replace skyrim it's because i have an idea for a new character build i want to mess around with the same was the case for oblivion and in both cases i've made so many characters at this point it would be impossible to count them all with maybe the exception of stuff like the shivering aisles in dragonborn i'm not replying content just to experience the content again it's just a means to a gameplay focused end so even if i felt compelled to play each character to 100 game completion each time so what the real fun of these games is in the moment moment experience not its structured content sure having multiple endings to quests can create some replay value but so can broad flexible and deep gameplay mechanics i'm sure a few people just cringed hearing me say skyrim has mechanical depth but there's definitely more here than people give it credit for and to demonstrate that let's talk about standing stones with the removal of classes birth signs were no longer possible but not wanting to ask them entirely bethesda created standing stones in their stead i actually like this change for a couple of reasons first off bethesda could have just left them out they got rid of much more important systems with the removal of classes science could have easily gone out the door with them instead they were reworked to fill the void the removal of classes created though with middling success they couldn't just bring over the birth signs that gave bonuses to starting attributes because a bunch of standing stones that just gave small bonuses to total health magicka and fatigue would be lame as hell if those were reworked to give bonuses to skill xp gain which is definitely felt in the early game if these are nice to kickstart a character and get it to where the player needs them to be to start having fun there's a reason these three xp boost stones are located on the road to riverwood and are the primary reason leveling up is so much quicker in skyrim as opposed to oblivion once again this is essential because without starting classes we need level ups and perks to distinguish characters and that differentiation needs to be made asap to keep the beginning few hours of the game from feeling any more monotonous than they already do i always saw these three standing stones as the substitution for favorite skills and attributes of the earlier test games there's a problem with skyrim's implementation here though in oblivion in morrowind there was never a point where your favorite skills and attributes stopped providing their leveling bonuses and that shouldn't be the case in skyrim either but that will be the case if you drop the mage stone for the astronaut and that's really lame these three should have been a different sort of stone something that can peacefully coexist with stones that provide abilities like the action knock or the steet and maybe they could have had other stones that provided leveling speed bonuses to mixed skills suited for hybrid classes the second reason i like this change is that they can be swapped out at any point in a play through because of the permanent nature of birth signs i often went a conservative route with picking them in oblivion and would go with something that just gave attribute buffs unless i was feeling adventurous i really wouldn't go with something like the atronach also i didn't bother with many of them because they were just terrible like the lover the problem is that those safer picks were much better suited early game and by the end i'd pretty much forgotten what i'd even picked between the reworks and skyrim that made pretty much all the powers useful in some way the tower still sucks and the ability to swap them out signs can play a much bigger role in progression like i said stones kind of fill the void the lack of classes created but not quite stones like the astronaut and the apprentice can have a very noticeable effect on how a mage plays and the ritual can make playing a necromancer a lot more fun especially early game bringing a whole room back to life for three and a half minutes is a great wrench to throw into combat scenarios just sucks that a lot of the cool and useful spells are limited to once a day and that's where the system falls very short because these powers can't be relied upon they fall into the back of players minds and they kind of just forget they exist like racial abilities couple that with the fact that they are a static ability that will not scale as the player levels up i understand why most players forget to talk about them in their skyrim videos but i see a lot of potential with this system and would love to see it iterated upon in test six if bethesda isn't going to bring back custom classes they should triple down on standing stones literally triple the number of them in the world and make many of them as unique and impactful as ones like the atronach that require a different way of playing the game maybe have one where the player can't use healing items and spells to regenerate health but different attacks or spells sucks the life force from enemies or sitting in the shadows lets them regen their meters make an ability that forces all enemies to focus on the players so that they can tank while their squishy companions pile on damage and then of course have a reverse ability that forces aggro off the player bethesda should think in terms of how to make these abilities create entirely unique playstyles and go all in with their implementations they shouldn't be afraid of something that will turn out to be overpowered because if a player doesn't like it they can just switch to another stone also because playstyle balancing in a single player game is a terrible concept that needs to be eradicated another improvement would be to add progression paths for the powers add quests or challenges the player needs to complete to upgrade the effect so they remain viable throughout the game or even just make it so players can spend something like dragon shouts to incrementally upgrade the abilities certainly there needs to be a way to get more than a once a day use out of these powers if we really want to go crazy allow players to slot two powers maybe after a series of quests or something i'm imagining things like ultimate abilities in mobas here there's tons of opportunity and expanding them in just about any way would be beneficial after being told how vulnerable the town is against a dragon sarian nods his head and promises to deliver the village's message to the yarl of whiterun asap he then immediately heads across the street to the riverwood trader in search of money i mean more supplies it's safe to assume most players will wander into the riverwood trader because it's the first general goods vendor we come across after an hour into the game and once they do they will be redirected to the barrow overlooking the town in search for a trinket stolen from the shopkeep the player is technically free to accept that quest and then head to whiterun anyway because the safety of the town surely should take priority here but the game then gives the player an escort to the edge of town where they pretty much are put on the school bus headed for the barrow it's clear the designers intended for the player to take this diversion even though riverwood is just waiting for a dragon to come and wreck the place of course it doesn't the player's curiosity and or greed is amply rewarded to the point that i always pick up this quest to knock it out before heading off to whiterun mainly because it's a good source for kitting out and leveling up my character some more but also because it's mandatory to be cleared for the main story if you don't clear it well guess where you're going to be going to the very next quest the player is made to feel like an idiot for not doing the counter-intuitive morally questionable thing of endangering the town to chase some shopkeep silly little trinket obviously riverwood is in no danger even if a random dragon attack occurs it's not like the town will be turned into another helgen alvarez's concerns seem neurotic in the context of what we know as seasoned players but think about it from the perspective of a new player who has no idea helgen was just a very scripted dramatic sequence why wouldn't they want to prioritize the safety of the village or if i'm role playing why would serious not want to help these people unless he's an [ __ ] or a dunce who doesn't understand the concept of consequences it's about as absurd as running off into the wilderness by myself after having dodged a village ruining dragon why on earth would i a sane rational new player or an experienced skyrim player roleplaying a scene rational character not follow hadvar 2 riverwood this is the problem with skyrim's introduction it very strongly urges attentive players to follow its main quest this is one of the reasons i don't get off the main quest until after meeting the greybeards and being tasked with retrieving the horn of jurgen windcaller in my opinion that's the first truly natural break in the main story and that's like three hours in for a seasoned player the consequences of this is that players will be forced into triggering random dragon attacks in their world for the rest of the game it's kind of ironic in a meta sense if the player ignores alvar's request and never reports ciara balgruff kicking off the series of events that leads to the attack on the watchtower then random dragons will never spawn in the world by completing alpha's request the player ensures the town is actually put in danger narratively speaking you can't really know that unless you have a lot of experience with the game but it just seems like a cruel trick for new players imagine being one of those thoughtless players that just wandered off chasing butterflies in the beginning of the game and just didn't have dragons spawn in their game for like 50 hours imagine how confused they'd be where are the dragons i don't see any dragons i see dragon peaks but no dragons while this dragon fighting game sure sucks show me the dragons todd it's kind of weird random dragon attacks aren't enabled from the start we see alduin hitting helgen and then that's it until the main quest is brought to a certain stage this isn't like oblivion where we don't even really know about the oblivion gates outside of the weird vision at the beginning of the game they get introduced at kavach and then they start spawning this makes for a more natural series of events leading up to the introduction of the end of the world scenario yeah oblivion still had an urgency issue with its main story but skyrim really amped that up to 11 to the point that you really have no excuse to ignore the main conflict but if you do then you completely deflate the urgency its story tries so hard to establish from the moment the player is given control of their character you see there is a reason why random dragon attacks aren't enabled from the start bethesda had a bunch of cool moments that they wanted the player to experience this necessitated weird design choices like that in doing so they ensured that we wouldn't find any random dragons out in the wild before we got to the watchtower sequence did you actually believe todd when he said players are free to go off and immediately ignore the main quest well have fun not having access to dragons and dragon shouts granted this might actually be a positive thing but we'll get to talk about dragon fights in just a little bit i'm really just intrigued by the idea of people doing this for their first playthrough and just ruining the game for themselves which is probably more common than you'd think if the amount of people who bragged about never delivering the amulet to joffrey is any indication for the prevalence of this anti-main quest mindset right so get the claw deliver the claw get to white run pass the speech check tutorial get the quest to fetch the dragon tablet and immediately complete it and now it's time for the second big dragon set piece irileth pops in and tells us a dragon is attacking the western watchtower and that we should come along too balgruff begs sarian to help defend his city because running away from it at haugen and getting a stone from a tomb qualifies him to fight a dragon though really what else is he going to do except throw bodies at this thing we make it out there and find the watchtower already burned down in the dragon mia i guess the dragon already won not for long though because it comes back for round two for some reason i guess murmur mermanier and this is going to be another thing that's going to [ __ ] me up i guess mermail near mermonier mermailer milner i guess mermanier had a grudge against this specific tower unless he heard our voices carrying over the mountains and was still hungry or at least i'm guessing dragons eat people they like to munch on anyone who gets too close so i guess that explains why they're attacking settlements and using the watchtower to bait and trap its food nice guess but not really nah the real reason is they just like to attack things what strategic value does this watch tower provide against a flying fire-breathing lizard for the city of whiterun none so why is marmal near so fixated on it because this is where the player is meant to be revealed as dragonborn which we already knew from the promo material and the back of the box but yeah okay i guess give us this big nonsensical fight sequence we'll find out later on that dragons are actually these really intelligent creatures that fight by using shouts and when they fight each other it's more like a verbal debate than an actual battle i guess yelling fire inferno sun over and over again just takes on a whole different meaning when it's between two dragons but we'll get to talking about the dragon language a little while later despite what lore states these guys are just big dumb flying monsters whose only purpose in this game is to be consumed by the player which is exactly what happens when sarian kills mermanier in terms of dragon fights this one might be the best but that's really not saying much this has been talked about to death and i'm not really going to be contradicting anyone's claims that dragon fights in this game are just bad like really bad this has to do for a variety of reasons first dragon ai is bad like really bad if you've played this game before you've probably had this happen enough times to develop a complex from it they have a lot of trouble prioritizing targets and it's not uncommon to see one engage you only to then fly off behind a mountain to kill a pack of wolves leaving you locked in combat so you can't fast travel or wait it might also switch targets two or three times in the middle of screaming fire leading to its damage being reduced and just all around looking stupid then there's the flight pathing they'll do these crazy plunges where they slam their noses into the ground and then pull an impossible climb back up they'll do janky strafes where they try to drive by bomb their targets and they'll just hover in place soaking up damage for no reason it's clear their ai packages are just struggling to keep them in the air without crashing into all the surrounding geometry and that's the next big issue with these fights they're random and happen in random locations you can get a fight on the side of a mountain and that's when you know you're really in for an awful experience the dragon will just not know how to engage in an environment like this which is crazy because there are tons of dragon spawn points on top of mountains the reason the watchtower fight is probably the best in the game is because the arena was specifically built for this fight it helps keep the dragon's ai in working order and also gives the player a fighting chance against the thing because now we're up to the final issue with dragons conventionally we should have virtually no offensive capabilities against these things they are powerful creatures capable of flight and are super nimble win in the air this is such a tactical advantage that fighting them on foot should pretty much be non-viable and guess what when they are flying around performing their ballet of jank they pretty much are impossible to kill you might get a good couple of hits with a bow or spell but good luck doing that enough times to really bring them down and if you're a pure warrior well you're absolutely boned so how does bethesda compensate players offensive abilities here give them access to unique weapons like a ballista force them to lure the dragon into a choke point by using geography to their advantage let players hop on the back of the dragon when it does a low strafe nope the thing just lands on the ground i guess it gets tired of flying and just has to take a quick breather the problem is that there's no special mechanics for fighting dragons the only abilities the player has access to for fighting these flying enemies are the ones designed for fighting land enemies bethesda knew they wanted dragons in this game when skye was still in pre-production why weren't plans to make gameplay systems to fight them also visualized at this point in time if they were unable or unwilling to make those systems work in their engine maybe random encounter flying boss enemies should not have been the focus for most of the game i'm not saying this game couldn't have dragons but they should definitely have not been such a big focus and they should not have been random encounters the fight at the watchtower isn't great but it's not obscenely terrible like most of the random encounter fights and that's because this encounter is scripted and the environment is built to at least give the ground forces some tactical options outside of just removing dragons are completely designing new gameplay systems that i doubt the creation engine could facilitate anyways just make a limited number of scripted dragon encounters occur in carefully built arenas that help mask the inadequacies of the ai and the player's abilities is this less epic than getting randomly attacked out in the wild i guess but why not make each city an arena for dragon fights then that would be pretty cool if they attacked a city and we had to use ballistas which already exist in the game and guard towers to wrangle the beasts to the ground so guards could finish them off how about getting ambushed in a narrow canyon that the player has to scale the walls in order to gain height advantage and trap the dragon in the canyon with trees and [ __ ] how about luring one into a cave and collapsing it on the dragon there's plenty of opportunity to use lightly scripted sequences to make more epic and memorable fights and also to make the dragons seem a little bit more intelligent instead we just get these janky fights in the middle of an open field where the dragons should have a clear advantage and then we just wait for the dragons to land so we can unceremoniously whack it to death i understand the need to have tons of dragons in the world so the player can absorb their souls to unlock shouts but this is a bethesda created problem with very simple solution don't make it a one-to-one ratio of dragon souls to shouts come up with a soul meter or something that the player fills when they absorb his soul and each shout costs x percentage of that meter to unlock or just make each soul give multiple souls or something this is a very easy problem to work around without having to resort to making the fights a quantity over quality thing of course using dragon souls to unlock shouts isn't really a barrier to begin with so why have it at all the dragon blood of the dragonborn allows them to learn the shouts like a champ anyways so why not just automatically unlock it upon learning it because then we'd be able to use shouts before the watchtower are you not even listening right the narrative purpose of all this i maintain that all of these counterproductive limitations exist simply to add urgency and drama to the story the revelation at the watchtower that the player is the dragonborn is meant to have all this weight because it seems to retroactively explain the events that led up to this moment it's supposed to be this light bulb moment but we already knew about all of this there's no mystery for the player here that they are the dragonborn so what's all this fanfare and these sequences supposed to achieve is sarian supposed to just be overwhelmed with emotions at the end of the series of events here's a better alternative the dragon attacks helgen and we escape only to find it's now attacking riverwood we chase after it to the town and help mount a defense there and bring the beast down absorb its soul and find out where dragonborn right then and there this of course necessitates the dragon cannot be alduin but why alduin attacked helgen is never answered anyways so who cares just make it one of alduin's freshly revived lieutenants dragons are now purely scripted set pieces that only arrive upon visiting specific locations and during specific quests no need to worry about flagging random dragon attacks on after the watchtower no need to worry about players missing out on being dragonborn and even if a player decides to not help riverwood which would be a great moral choice they are guaranteed to run into another dragon at some point and because they are all designed to be epic fights we don't have to worry about the players being subjected to a lame random fight in a field as their first battle the rest of the sequence can play out the same nothing here excludes that from being the case and that's pretty much that this doesn't fix the urgency issue but we are pretty much stuck with that problem by virtue of this story as you return anyhow whiterun that was the voice of the greybeards summoning you to high rothgod this hasn't happened in centuries at least not since tiber septim himself was summoned when he was still talos about yarrow balgruff who was so hot for sarian now that he was dragonborn and save the city slathered him in honorifics making him the thane of the city so in less than three days serion went from political prisoner to titled though not landed nobility okay maybe skyrim isn't all that bad high rock can we balgruff informs sarian that he should get up to high rothgar right away because nobody refuses the summons of the greybeards okay yeah sure fine this will let us get the second part of unrelenting force and whirlwind sprint anyhow this next sequence is an interesting compromise between gameplay design elements and we haven't discussed fast travel and quest markers so let's do that real fast so you have a game that has regenerating health do you think the designers would start putting health packs around the world probably not what if a game lets players save and reload at any time are they going to then make a nifty and creative way to respawn the player upon death unlikely they'd just expect players would reload a previous save this is the sort of impact gameplay mechanics have on the decisions and priorities of game designers if designers have a system that tells players exactly where to go at all times with just a visual indicator why would they then write detailed instructions on how to get to that location too the ability for quest designers to just drop one of these guys on the map instead of writing and having voice actors read dialogue is a huge time saving advantage that time could then be spent making more quests or making a system that endlessly generates quests for players i'm not a big detractor for quest markers i get the compromise they allow designers to make but skyrim's hasty use of them is more than a little egregious i can turn them off in my journal but with how most of the quests are written and the lack of information in the awful quest journal i'm gonna be completely at a loss for where to go being told my objective lies in some fort but not even being told what side of skyrim that fort is located in does me no good bethesda tried getting a little creative with quest markers like having them only lead the player to the building or the dungeon but not the actual quest objective and sometimes giving no markers at all a lot of these quests happen to be in the dragonborn dlc where bethesda seemed to have been responding to criticisms against skyrim leading players by the nose way too much with their quest markers one of the most memorable quests during my sirian play-through had me going to the reach looking for a brier heart nelloth's only hint was to search the western mountains of skyrim and this had me trying to recall knowledge i had about the region i ended up stumbling into a gold mine on nothing more than a hunch and that turned out to be right i found my briarheart and felt like i'd actually accomplished something more than that though it got me thinking of a better quest structure for skyrim other than just mindlessly following quest markers to start with quests need to give actual details the location of their objectives either from an npc or at least the journal nelloth's quest worked well because i needed to simply find a type of enemy of which there were quite a few in that part of the map for something more specific more specific directions would obviously be needed next a good quest should reward players who are paying attention to the world factions and events for this quest i had to recall who the force sworn were the fact that they were at war to take back the reach and figure what sort of strategic resources the reach had that the force one would want to occupy if i didn't know that i could learn almost all of that by just visiting the main city of the hold and getting the backstory we could take this idea a step further if quests routinely had an investigative aspect to them and players were conditioned to seek out answers by visiting towns cities and inns quest designers can put npcs in there who can steer wayward players towards their objective even better maybe those npcs could offer secondary objectives encouraging players even more to investigate their quest objectives finally the quests should involve interacting with the best parts of the game in this case it's exploring skyrim's overworld giving players tangible rewards like gold xp and gear is nice but rewarding them with experiences can be equally as satisfying dropping the player into scenarios where they can interact with the more dynamic parts of the game is a safe support to lean on as a designer it's weird how bethesda built this giant detailed world with all of these dynamic systems and then encourage players to stick to the most static parts of the experience going so far still letting players just skip the best parts entirely by just fast traveling everywhere and guess what we're gonna be talking about next skyrim is entirely indifferent about whether players use fast travel or not and that's a problem bethesda should be doing everything it can to discourage players from using fast travel because so much of the game happens when walking between locations this is where all of its elements interact the best there's so much of the world that can be completely missed if the player is just following quest markers and fast traveling all over the map bethesda takes some sort of misguided pride from the testimonies of long-time players who claim they just found an entire village they had no idea existed after 500 hours of playtime this isn't players vouching for how big and detailed the world is it's just them indirectly admitting to having fast traveled most of their way through skyrim i have to wonder how many players have even been to karthwaistan and done the quest to rid the town minds of its silver blood occupation i imagine not many and that's because no major quests lead here and it's off the beaten path so it won't get picked up when players are fast traveling to a major junction and then walking to whatever dungeon their quest marker is leading them to i still wouldn't know about this place's existence if i hadn't done a no fast travel playthrough last year the village and its quest isn't that interesting but it does help show the corruption of the silver bloods and the negative influence they have on the region we're still looking at many hours worth of work for some people at bethesda to put this place on the map but because it's not connected to the world via quest markers and fast travel hot spots it's been relegated to some obscure backwater it's like building a town in the us and not connecting it to a major highway that town is pretty much doomed to die off that's how consequential map markers and fast traveling are in this game and when one of the supposed draws for this game is exploring a large and detailed world it seems crazy bethesda would rely so much on two elements that undermine that core appeal but it goes deeper than that because there are entire cities that players have written off as being boring and worthless let's take marcarth as an example beautiful city probably the most visually distinct in the game it has a whole conspiracy going on with the silverbloods and the forcehorn hosts some of the most popular side quests in the game two days requests one of the best looking player houses but then i always hear players say they never visit mark harth or the reach in general well if we look at the main quest and all the guilds and major side quest chains we'll see markarth is hardly ever a destination as far as i can tell only the thieves guild sent us there and sanguine's quest will have us waking up there because bethesda failed to put mark harth on their quest marker highway this perfectly fine city has earned the reputation of being empty and pointless oddly enough windhelm 2 suffers in this regard it has the civil war to attract players there but most of the time i found myself fast traveling to windhelm stables because i was just using the city as a fast travel junction the city has plenty of sidequests shops and whatever else but it feels neglected because the quest map marker highway of the major quest lines don't bring the player behind its walls very often all right fast travel alternatives skyrim already took a step in the right direction by putting carriages in front of the major cities that will take the player to specific destinations for a fee but not enough thought went into its implementation it's short-sighted how some of these places like winterholds cannot be traveled to but there's no couch to take the player out of that location winterhold is especially frustrating because walking back from the city takes the player down a long enemy infested road that snakes its way back to windhelm that route also highlights how poorly designed the map of skyrim is for players who want to travel by foot looking at this map we can see a perfectly viable land route that takes us to the northern side of windhelm but because there's no northern gate or even a path that swings around to the front of the city the proper route is this stupid long indirect road through the freezing mountains windhelm isn't the only city that lacks more than one approach in fact the only walled city that has more than one entrance is rifton yes i know there is a gate to the docks of windhelm but that's not intended to be an entrance for the city it's just a way to access the docks sure i can jump into the freezing water and swim around the docks but that violates my immersion if there isn't a direct path with steps so my npc followers can pat find their way through then it's not an intended route for me to take an even better example is whiterun whiterun is a city that a foot traveling player can find themselves approaching from any direction because of its central location on the map but if approaching from the northeast i guess i'll be walking a few more minutes skyrim is about as hostile towards pedestrians as houston is and just like how everyone drives in houston due to a lack of public transit and walkable streets most players opt to fast travel in skyrim because it often feels like the game just isn't designed to be played without it which well it isn't sure we got the carriages and none of the cities are immediately unlocked to fast travel to like they were in oblivion but that doesn't mean much in skyrim the funny thing while oblivion had all of its cities discovered so players could immediately fast travel to them its cities all had multiple gates it also had frost crack spire which offered teleporters to all the guild halls for the mages guild a fantastic form of traveling that the college of winterholds really could have used if we weren't going to get a northern gate for windhelm going back to riften i would also like to draw attention to the shortcut we unlock for getting into the thieves guild after a certain point in the game i'm guessing this is taking inspiration from the wealth for getting into the shade in hall dark brotherhood sanctuary both of these were nice additions because both guild halls required going through multiple loaded zones to reach and i think there's a good idea in these shortcuts if we apply them to the world itself but what if completing certain quests unlocked shortcuts for getting into whiterun what if every city had hidden back doors players trying to avoid the guards could utilize maybe we could just find unmarked shortcuts off the beaten path that would drastically reduce travel time for pedestrian players giving access to these shortcuts would be a fine intrinsic reward well assuming fast travel was much more limited and players were actually intended to physically traverse the world in real time you see there's a whole new dimension to skyrim that would be opened up if it just had been determined that players ought to be walking a lot in skyrim that's not to say fast traveling can't exist tied to some sort of consumable item like a rare crystal that the player uses in order to teleport to their destination then expand the carriage system add ferries to cross bodies of water add teleporters to the college maybe have some kind of ancient nordic teleportation gate system the dragonborn can utilize and of course key horses and rideable dragons and all that other stuff there's also a missed opportunity in the dwemer ruins black reach has multiple entrances with its lift towers and connections to some of the ruins so players can pop up in different parts of the map depending on the lift they access from below expand those caverns to cover much of skyrim and let players use them as underground shortcuts yeah they might be dangerous but they can be quicker and monetarily rewarding to utilize blackreach was originally envisioned as some sort of underground domer highway but we will see when we get to talk about blackreach that ended up not making it into the game fully all of this is to get the player to think more about how they are going to navigate the world this adds much greater depth to a part of the game that as it stands is barely a thought for most players it offers more opportunity for players to explore and interact with the overworld and maybe help places like karthwaistan become more relevant to players it offers more opportunity for the game to impact the players experience and create a more meaningful adventuring experience this is all demonstrated on our trip to high rothgar if the player has been riding the main story railroad to this point then they aren't going to have a fast travel point anywhere close to high rothgar or its surfacing village iverstead it's clear bethesda intended for players to travel from white run to eye for stead by foot because there are shortcuts to the village attentive players might notice a shortcut through the mountains next to the stormcloak camp that can get them to iverson very quickly or they might find this fallen tree that will let them shave off a couple of minutes climbing the northern cliffs there's also a road from helgen that will lead to iverstead or the player can take a carriage to riften and double back to the village the fact that this switchback shortcut exists is pretty clear evidence that bethesda understood a lot of players would be walking to this village and put a lot of thought into how the players would be getting there they also dotted each route with plenty of points of interest that enhance the adventure there's a reason this is probably my favorite part of the main story i imagine this was intended to be the off-ramp for the main quest as this is meant to show the player what happens if they step off the beaten path but sadly these unique shortcuts and thoughtfully designed routes are not really the norm in skyrim like i've been explaining skyrim is hostile towards pedestrians with how much of its map is laid out because the assumption was that most players would be fast traveling once given the option and bethesda was right with that assumption because outside of this specific instance traveling by foot can often be repetitive tedious and unrewarding what greater experience is there for me doing the college of winterhold and refusing to fast travel none i'll just have to walk down the same two routes through the same environment at least a dozen times i don't even have the option to carriage ride halfway to my destination i gotta walk every time or fast travel it was never intended for me not to fast travel for this quest chain the best way to avoid mental fatigue during major quest chains is to just do a bunch of them simultaneously and complete them over the course of an entire playthrough as opposed to blasting through a single chain's quests back to back you still have to do the same number of walks but at least you won't have to do the same walk six times over in four hours with the walk to iverstead it's only intended for me to do that walk once maybe twice and the routes there are beautiful varied convenient and a little hidden so as to encourage exploration what would have been even better is if someone in whiterun gave me a hint about one of the routes or a vendor sold a map of the shortcuts around the mountain but i digress when i get to iverstead i'm introduced to the village itself and i'm once again encouraged to explore it i find myself naturally chatting with a lot of the npcs heading into the inn and just poking around town and in doing that i get exposed to a bunch of different quests ivor said has a lot more going on than karth wayston but that's no doubt because bethesda knew players were guaranteed to visit it because they weren't given a fast travel point straight to high rothgar what if karthwaistan had a related point of interest to attract players to and the game didn't just let players teleport to that location i doubt karthuson would feel like a town that a new highway was built to avoid the walking doesn't end in iverstead because the final leg of the trip is taking serion up the seven thousand steps of the throat of the world turns out the seven thousand steps are only about seven hundred and the arduous climb climic and yar balgruff hypes up is accomplishable in about an in-game afternoon kinda pathetic how the trip to iverstead grossly overshadows the climb up the steps but that's to be expected when you draw attention to how difficult and long a journey is when the scale and mechanics of your game just can't do it justice had nobody really drawn attention to the climb and the number of steps the climb of the mountain would feel like an appropriate conclusion to this journey but because we had in-game npcs and out-of-game marketing material hyping this up just became another meme players like to dunk on and that's a real shame like i said this is probably my favorite part of the main quest and had more quests of skyrim emulated the good parts of it the skyrim would have been a substantially more enjoyable experience with parts of it feeling like i'm on an actual adventure and not just fast traveling between quest markers on the way up the 7000 steps we will occasionally come across these tablets that hint at what we'll be learning up in high rothgar they cover the ancient dragon war and broad details the advent of the thumb in men the first nordic empire the defeat at red mountain jurgen wind caller's creation of the way of the voice and high rothgar and the story of how the greybeard summoned tiber septim the only other person ever summoned the same way sarian had been summoned sirian answers the summons but can't help but feel a bit disappointed turns out only nords have an innate gift for the voice and even fewer are interested in developing that power the greybeards haven't had a disciple since alfred's stormcloak and the slow manner in which they work indicates why the future rebel quit their sanctuary the greybeards are fine the cynic in me wants to complain about how the greybeards are too generic and on the nose of course the ancient monastic order of recluses are old men in robes but honestly not everything has to be revolutionary in a story a good supporting faction doesn't have to be a new subversive take just for the sake of being fresh knowing when to stick to fundamentals and employing a trope is an underappreciated form of creative restraint wanting to subvert the players expectations at every turn is how something like the shadow broker turned into a stupid suit-wearing monster i can't say if the greybeard's inoffensive mediocrity was intentional or lack of creativity but they're fine bethesda tried to make the player feel like they are a newcomer in these halls but the fact the player is the chosen one of akatosh blessed with the blood of the dragon really tosses a wet blanket on that they try to set up the greybeards as the cautious father who doesn't want to see their child rush off to get that music degree from the expensive out-of-state college but the player already knows that they are basically divinity walking on nirn that sort of big dick energy is just very difficult to clamp down on after everything we've already seen it just makes iron gears calls for the dragonborn to temper their growth ring hollow and just makes it seem like the greybeards really don't understand the enormity of the events here this ends up developing into a conflict between the player and the greybeards especially when the player's role as dragonborn necessitates violence in action they aren't complete pacifists but their strict adherence to the way of the voice makes them very wary of action deliberate or not this way of the voice is the more interesting aspect of their story the way of the voice demands its adherence only use the voice in times of true need much like how the ancient dragons had used it during the peaceful years before the dragon war the way seeks to teach its followers to pursue understanding through peaceful meditation and use that understanding to create balance in their lives according to this philosophy the voice is truly only meant for meditation and worship of the nordic gods though they seem to hold a serious reverence for akatosh despite him not being part of the ancient nordic pantheon when we get to meet their leader at the top of the mountain it'll become clear why they made allowance for akatosh in their worship really the only missing piece of the greybeard story is how someone becomes a greybeard there's a distinct lack of young blood here and as far as we know the last person to receive training in the way of the voice was alfred's stormcloak way back in the day the fact that the greybeards aren't training any new members seems short-sighted the graveyard lifestyle apparently leads to a long life and irongear is the eldest member and still seems spry to some extent but you never know it takes a lifetime of studying for a non-dragonborn to become a great beard so it seems prudent they'd always have at least one disciple they'd be coaching as it stands right now looks like the greybeards are facing extinction this is not only a point pedants such as myself can trip over but it's also a missed opportunity to show this faction from another angle having some younger nord doing the [ __ ] work and complaining to the dragonborn about how the greybeards never show him the cool shouts could humanize the order a bit more it could also demystify the voice because most nords are supposed to be born with an innate ability to harness it yet we rarely see anyone even express interest in the nord and dragonborn exclusive magic let alone trying to hone it having a greybeard trainee here might help bridge that logical gap there'd also be an opportunity to expand the faction a little more maybe the trainee is jealous of the dragonborn and the respect that they get from the greybeards maybe the player can do a quest or two for the trainee to help them train maybe they can become disillusioned with the greybeard lifestyle and can actually join the dragonborn as a follower and be a really slamming follower who can use shouts in combat then we can have a little moral dilemma that tests our commitment to the way of the voice if we convince the trainee to stay at high rothgar or join us in our travels really just do something more than leaving the greybeards as a faction that gives the player radiant quest to get dragon shouts from there's another angle that can be taken here though the angle that ulfric stormcloak has been taking with his rebellion modern nor degeneracy the lack of interest and prevalence in the way of the voice could be seen as a symptom of modern nords living for centuries under the role of the empire weakening as a race letting their old religion fade into obscurity letting the elves ban their patron hero tiber septim losing autonomy of their own province and even losing interest in the ancient magic that their race was gifted with sadly getting into the watering down of the modern nord we'll have to wait for part 2 when we get talking about the civil war i just had to make that observation here because it is a valid interpretation after introductions and impressing the beards with his mastery of the thumb the greybeards tasked sarin with retrieving the horn of their founder from his tomb aaron gear concludes this task would be an appropriate test of sarien's vocal abilities and we will talk about ustengrav but first let's continue talking about milk drinking nords and discuss followers in skyrim at this point in the playthrough i embarked on a journey to find a follower to be the tank of my mage and oh what a saga that turned into being the pinnacle of the martial classes did come with a drawback sarian found himself at a disadvantage if someone got close enough to stab him he needed a shield of meat that would on its own according intelligence placed itself between him and whatever fools sarian needed to roast but where to find such a specimen he needed someone beefy and strong so proficiency and heavy armor was a must it would be better if they were also proficient in one-handed weapons and block for various reasons we will get into and talk about enchanting but heavy armor at the very least using his extensive elven intellect saryan was able to conceive a truly exhaustive list of any and all people predisposed towards submissiveness but looking at the list of potential candidates heavy armor was already a big filter and one handed limited that considerably more the roster of house carls had some good candidates but i was trying to avoid the new meta that is lydia and all but one of the other holds was already being claimed by other protagonists of this series this only left jordis the sword maiden but solitude's questline is uh extensive we'll get to that in jordan's in good time but for the time being house carls were off the table so that left randos and mercs only one work had all that i wanted but upon closer inspection that turned out not to be the case you see bethesda made an uh-oh oopsie they never bothered to fix in that they gave some followers the wrong classes so a follower that had a one-handed warrior class might have equipment for a barbarian like in vorstak's case because i'm running the unofficial patch the authors of that mod decide to change the classes for these followers to reflect their default equipment rather than changing their default equipment that means there's actually fewer one-handed tank warriors in the wild so no mercs for sarian this left the list of rejects i mean uh alternate help going through this list is also a disheartening ordeal as the reclassification of the unofficial patch left only a single cat as a one-handed warrior follower but saryan is inexplicably allergic to cats so karjo will not be making an appearance here with literally no viable candidates thanks to the unofficial patch viserion was going to have to lower his standards and permit two-handed warriors into the pool that's when he revealed himself bane or the uh actually he doesn't get a cool suffix or honorific it's just bainer we could have gone with uthgard the unbroken but she's a little intimidating for a nice guy like sarri so vayner it was he seemed to check all the boxes so saren pulled him aside for an interview but not before completing just a few steps you see in order to recruit boehner we gotta beat him in a brawl rather than having to do a side quest like some of the other followers like guitar i got too morthal only to realize i can't get vayner to brawl him until after finishing late 2 rest because he's one of the people that volunteers to take on the vampire lair outside of town so it turns out he does have a requisite quest but seeing as i was already in morthal and sirian would need to be thaned to build the house in swamps laterest would have to be tackled anyhow okay so we go chat with y'all ravencrone get the light of the land and solve the murder mystery of morthal this leads saryan to a vampire lair with a bunch of townsfolk one of which being boehner and he and a bunch of the other people tucked tail and run not a good first impression for our candidate after the vampires were dealt with and sarian did a bunch of other things to become thane of morthal boehner was found standing around doing his usual thing it's uh it's kind of sad really he wants to be a town guard but they've been stringing him along so he's decided to be a guard anyways but not yet paid for it it's actually even more sad because the town guards feel so bad for bain or they let him sleep in the guard house at night oh god it's even it's funny i've read that line like 20 times and it's still funny oh poor vayner you won't be getting paid from my gig either actually it's even worse than that he has to pay sarian because he bets he can beat the mage in a hand-to-hand brawl no magic of course but he didn't say anything about potions here we see the extensive brawling system bethesda took so much pride in they mentioned it several times in promotional material i have no idea why it's skyrim's combat boil down to its absolute basic form it's literally just standing and spamming punches can't even block it's just left and right hooks until the enemy's health reaches a certain point and they give up it's possibly the worst mechanic in the game and giuliano's only knows why bethesda insisted on using it as often as they did i guess they got a little desperate after disposition and persuasion had been removed boehner loses the fight and the bet so he pays sarri in 100 gold and offers to follow the dragonborn around for people like bayner there really is no rock bottom oh but this story is just beginning first i want to talk about the argonian who couldn't we got a lot of follower stories here so buckle in sirian came in possession of an abandoned farmstead out in the plains near roarik's dead serion never going to degrade himself doing things like manual labor needed a farm hand to handle the operations there being the only argonian fowler in all of skyrim durkheithus seemed like the most obvious candidate for the job sarien made it over to darkwater crossing to scoop up the would-be asset for the farm but it turns out the lizard went missing or walked off the job you know how these listings are and the trail led sarri into dark darkwater pass this place was an absolute slog for the low-leveled mage the foamer were merciless their chorus was of course even more so and it wasn't long before saren's potions were depleted fortunately dirkeithus managed to free himself from his cell below i don't know how though the key being inside his cell might have something to do with it and he was able to lend support for the dungeon boss with that it was back to darkwater crossing where it became clear the argonian was not a suitable farmhand essarian didn't have need for a ranger on his squad so i guess sarian just got to appreciate doing a good deed for the day sarian would eventually find some nord beggars to work his fields and remember ifgard the unbroken well sarien was impressed with the cut of her jib and made her a farm manager he would have preferred a high elf filled position but none wanted the job serene couldn't blame them nords are terrible workers and he wouldn't want to be having to manage them either he could have installed an imperial in the role but all imperials are thieves and backstabbers and cannot be trusted a britain maybe but nobody impressed him uthgard it was at any rate she did a good enough job making sure sarian's coin was available when it came time for him to collect and his supply of mushrooms never ran out but back to our boy baner things were not going so well with him for starters he just wasn't very good in combat he'd go down enough times that he was sort of becoming a liability but nothing was so aggravating as our first dragon fight when boehner decided to run away and leave me stranded on the side of a mountain battling a dragon on my own this being skyrim i managed on my own and never having seen behavior out of a follower like this i figured it was kind of a fluke i knew i wasn't imagining it i heard him signaling his retreat and i got it on footage but i kind of thought nothing of it until our second dragon fight we came up on roarick's stead and found alduin rezzing another dragon on a hill behind town so we went over there to slay the beast solid flat ground ample cover not a narrow mountain path we got this everything was going well until boehner decided he'd had enough and exited the fight i figured he just got downed or something unfortunate but i was getting used to it by this point minimum wage minimum effort i always say that is until i fell back and found him cowering behind a stone like literally cowering i'd never seen a follower do this before this is completely unacceptable get out there and fight out of desperation i pop a call to arms scroll in hopes that that might get bainer do his job again but it wasn't until he was cornered like a rat that he pulled out his weapon and got ready to fight only for me to finish the dragon off with a couple more shots confused i dug through the usp some more and found that there's some more to follow ai than just stats and equipment there's also these hidden attributes that affect their ai packages personality traits if you would the uesp didn't list all of these attributes for all the followers so i installed the creation kit and started looking at each follower's stats for myself that's when i found the three main stat attributes affecting follower combat behavior these being aggression confidence and assistance i then went through and started comparing every single follower taking screenshots of any that seemed interesting looking at what a good follower like lydia's stats look like we can see she's appropriately aggressive so she'll attack anyone the party attacks fool hardy so she will fight until being knocked down and she helps allies and friends here's car show he's not aggressive and he's just got average confidence so he's going to avoid higher level enemies but i have it on good authority he's a good companion boehner though oh no unaggressive average confidence and helps nobody yeah i'd say that pretty much has baner here down to a [ __ ] t he's up for any crime though after all this i guess we now know why he's not making it out to the morthal guard and has to resort to doing crappy odd jobs to make ends meet also him [ __ ] talking the yarl and plotting with grom to have her ousted is probably not doing him any favors either yeah he's a real piece of work and that's the story of how i accidentally hired probably the worst companion in the game okay to give old boehner the benefit of the doubt i did find two worst companions sven and roggy not beard both of these characters are capped at a paltry level 20. both have generally useless stats for followers considering followers can't do alchemy enchanting or smithing no idea why so many followers have those as their three major skills and both sport some really unfortunate personality stats i'd rank sven just a little higher because at least he helps allies in his brave though his mood is flagged to fear so i don't know ragi on the other hand is unaggressive average confidence and helps nobody his dialogue is generally very pleasant and happy-go-lucky so at least he will bring some positivity to the party but he has no stomach for criminal behavior at least boehner was chill with anything up to and including murder so congrats boehner you aren't nearly as useless as rocky not that it matters i dumped him on someone else the first chance i got but that's the story for later for now we got other followers to discuss starting with hilda the goat it's important to bring her up because you'll be seeing her in just about all the footage for the rest of this video because having hilda results in some consequences so she's part of the pets creation club content pack which brings with it all sorts of other critters that the player can acquire to have follow them around they can't really do much except carry a meager amount of supplies and inhale those case give milk the others have just as equally unique and useless abilities and it's really not worth getting into for the most part they're just visual novelty and really not much else but hilda and the pet skeever are undoubtedly the best of the bunch because the player can strap a pack to them and upgrade their storage capacity a bit more hilda was relegated to lugging around my crafting materials mostly what they're really good at though is getting in the player's way a lot you see because critters are generally pretty fast and they're also unarmored these pets have absolutely no problem keeping up with the player when they go sprinting off into the world unlike an armored companion like boehner or lydia so the first follower to join a fight was invariably held up without fail every single time except she can't fight she can't take damage or take out grow but she will take up space this would be especially annoying in a cave where she would stop in the middle of a narrow path and block my movement that killed me enough times to make me want to dismiss her but her second ability made up for that drawback she also had the uncanny ability to completely ruin every cutscene and conversation because for some reason she loved being within my line of sight during conversations so for the most of the main story meiji's college and dragonborn we'd be standing around talking about the end of the world and all that nonsense while i go just sat off to the side of the person i was talking to just being silly the novelty of that never wore off so i kept her as bethesda intended then there's the goblin follower gog he's part of a bigger creation club pack that adds goblins into skyrim kinda it adds them to a single cave near rifton and lots of steel blue and taloma hey guys remember oblivion it also adds a whole quest line with an elaborate story and choices to make and no i'm just kidding it just adds a dungeon with some flavor text into a journal that's going to be something of a repeating theme for these creations we find out the goblin has some sort of thai superior scene and he was sentenced to death by combat for denying the blue god and nobody cares it's not like any of this [ __ ] is canon i mean when we get to talking about the crusader relics i hope to the divines this stuff isn't canon so talking about the story in these packs is about as stimulating and relevant as discussing fan fiction once freed god can join us as another follower bringing the party total up to four five if we count sarian summons and six after we get duel summons oh and gog has a summon of his own so six seven a storm atronach that can reap untold destruction sometimes the storm atronach uses a chain lightning spell that will indiscriminately hit anyone near the target for a friend alike so i might be a little too close to an enemy and suddenly zap there goes some of my health and precious magicka it doesn't stop there though because it can also arc and hit my other followers too and too much of that will turn followers hostile towards the storm astronaut and suddenly my entire party is fighting each other sometimes in the middle of a battle oops guess nobody actually tested the followers because this problem manifests a lot the skeleton warlock creation club summons also has the same problem that will be 400 bethesda bucks please once again i could have just dropped the goblin fowler but that would be admitting defeat also that astronaut would come in clutch from time to time it was about 50 50 if gog was actually helpful or not and those are funny enough odds to me also the astronaut was another follower with quick movement speed and an even bigger hitbox than hilda so in caves retreating was basically impossible it would also clog up the pathways for my useful followers and summons so sometimes i just find myself completely alone in a fight with no backup on the way thanks to gogs's astronaut nice seeing as i was 0 4 three four five followers at this point i just caved and brought lydia on board i know it's a meme using lydia but she's honestly a very solid follower most of the game after the whole baynar incident i came to appreciate her contribution to the team even more she accompanied me for most of the game but eventually she too was retired for jordan's the sword meeting who i [ __ ] you not is just lydia with blonde hair and a different voice she's the house carl of solitude which involved many steps and a lot of money to acquire and you can imagine my disappointment having done all of that just to get a discount lydia 2.0 but we'll get to all that solitude business in due time for real now it's time to get that horn with boehner in tow it's off to oostengrov it's a drugger tomb dungeon dive but ustengruff is one of the better tombs in skyrim with some visual and gameplay variety bethesda started mixing things up in skyrim by having dungeons with multiple factions in them as opposed to oblivion where an undead cave would spawn nothing but undead maybe you'd find faction adjacent dungeons with necromancers and undead but those were still rare exceptions in the monotonous dungeon experience while not always the case i'd say about half the dungeons in skyrim would play with having multiple factions in them usually hostile with each other this could result in some interesting outcomes like both factions slaughtering each other which is handy for a necromancer or a stealth player it can also just help make skyrim's world feel more alive as it reinforces the illusion of npcs in this game having agency of their own it can also hoodwink the player by making them think they'd found a dungeon that wasn't a drug or tomb only for the original faction to get swapped to more undead a few minutes in your mileage may vary with that ustengrov houses at least three factions bandits necromancers and undead with a potential fourth if we count critters like spiders when we arrive there we find most of the bandits already dead from the necromancers who'd begun using their bodies for their necromantic purposes and this disturbs the draugr who start to engage the necros there's some sort of conflict here and while some dungeons will actually have journals and things that will sometimes create a little story that links to other dungeons and bandit factions this one does not it's pretty quick to ditch the multiple factions altogether leaving us to fight against nothing but undead in critters the idea behind this dungeon was that it's meant to test the player's dragonborn abilities but the problem is that when the player gets here they are only guaranteed to have two words of unrelenting force and one of whirlwind sprint with become ethereal being located in the dungeon but no guaranteed dragon soul to unlock it so in effect the designer's options for designing challenges meant to get players to engage with the shot mechanics is incredibly limited and what a waste of an idea this dungeon ended up being as a result the only shout even needed for this dungeon is whirlwind sprint in order to pass this gate puzzle and maybe to cross these pressure plates there's also that hidden treasure that requires blinking across some platforms but that's optional unrelenting force is completely superfluous in this context relegated to a little stun the player can use in combat and possessing no utility for any sort of puzzle element so even in the context of players having two shouts the designers failed to make this test of the players as thumb actually test more than a single shout once i can understand the designers not wanting to gate new players off by forcing them to go out and find different shouts needing to pass the puzzles of this dungeon but they could have at least tested the two guaranteed shots in a series of puzzles maybe then they could have had optional chambers that would test other shots the player can acquire over the course of the game maybe the whole team could be a complex of chambers and the idea is that the player would revisit the place from time to time to clear different challenges for different rewards just something that makes it feel like this place is what the greybeards had hyped it up to be but you know what else is a disappointment the horn not because it's not there when we arrive i'll talk about that dumb point in just a second i mean the horn itself the greybeards send us out to retrieve this ancient relic of great significance belonging to the grandmaster of their order and it's just some clutter object in a game that is already lacking in unique powerful artifacts this could have been an opportunity to make some dragonborn specific bling the player can play with maybe the horn lets the player amplify the effects of their shouts or beef up select shouts or reduce shout cooldowns something along those lines the white file quest ends with the player getting a unique recharging potion which admittedly is a little bit useless but it was a good concept that could have been adapted for the horn and dragon shouts once again just a little something to add more depth and variety to the shouting mechanic but uh yeah we get to jurgen's crypt and the horn isn't there just a note from a stranger telling us to meet them at the inn in riverwood now it's time to introduce delphine and complain about her somehow getting to the horn even though the place had a puzzle that required whirlwind sprint to pass i actually always assumed that delphine took the back way in through the sealed stone doors the game where mrsa frey can use a [ __ ] lockpick on nord puzzle doors i figured all doors were fair game for breaking into although come to think of it why didn't she just pull the same trick to get the dragonstone of bleakfall's barrow i don't know maybe she was just too afraid to fight that dungeon boss this is clearly just one of those we didn't think this through moments on the part of the writers and designers so we're free to come up with whatever idiotic head cannon we want to get her into that tomb it's one of those sticking points that probably shouldn't garner as much attention and debate as it does when the whole dungeon was a lackluster ordeal that doesn't even end with a satisfying conclusion it just sort of ends as if they just ran out of time to finish the dungeon i can't help but just get hung up on this dumb plot hole in riverwood sarian meets this nightingale wannabe and so you're the dragonborn i've been hearing so much about i think you're looking for this we need to talk follow me after being invited into her private quarters sarian got to know delphine just a little bit more she was serious assertive hated the thalmor and most importantly only half human she's perfect when she suggested they go slay a dragon cesarean could prove he was dragonborn he couldn't resist they'd only just met but already sorry knew it was meant to be divine fate if you would delphine and sarin went to kinds grove with their pet norton toe where they met up with a dragon from helgen mocking the dragonborn and his traveling companions he flew off as he left his minion to finish them off with the fury of a madman and a burning desire to impress his mysterious companion sirians slew the foul beast and that's when delphine made the greatest reveal yet she's the last of the blades as a dragonborn she is sworn to serve sari into her grave magnificent she revealed all that she knew which admittedly wasn't that much but she had a valid target the valmer those dreaded evil disgraces upon the alma race of course they bring back the dragons they are a threat to all that is good in the world trying to murder the blades and delphine after all of course they have to pay but delphine proving as wise as she was capable in espionage and combat urged caution they must first gather information and evidence siren would have to infiltrate the thalmor embassy of skyrim and gather the proof of their misdeeds that would certainly be contained within and being the perfect guilt this side of tamriel delphine of course had contacts that would be able to get serion into the embassy to do just that uh uh i'm sorry i i just don't know how to make this part interesting delphine is such a boring and unlikable character she's the embodiment of this story's disdain towards the players agency she's full-on boss mode the moment we meet her as the writers try to build her up into this mastermind blade in the shadows type character and they really just give the player no reason to believe anything she's saying except trust me bro for all we know she could be the thalmor plant just because she gave us the useless horn were meant to trust her the best worst part is that once we prove we're dragonborn she not only continues to be stuck in boss mode even after telling the player the blades are meant to serve the dragonborn she then goes i actually don't know anything about what's going on sorry to lead you on but the thalmor they're definitely up to something i just i just need you to find the proof for me like lady aren't you supposed to be the one convincing me why do i need to get the evidence to prove your point to me as of now we have virtually no reason to be against the thalmor so what's to stop us from just turning her over to the thalmor aside from the fact that the story forbids it aside from delphine being an unlikable plot device character we don't know nearly enough about the thamworks make any sort of judgment about them she's supposed to be one of the more rational characters in this story as we will see when esburn shows up and the game tries really hard to set him up as this cracked up scatter brain but honestly he ends up coming across as more composed than delphine who appears to be pretty far off base with our suspicions here i'm gonna save most of the discussion of the thalmor for the second video when we're discussing the civil war because well spoiler alert they know nothing about the dragons and infiltrating their embassy and fighting a few of their moocs and the sewers of rifton are about all they're going to be doing in the main story it's honestly kind of bizarre how they go from being enemy number one to finding out who we are and who we work for to just kind of [ __ ] off for the rest of the story once we get a hold of esburn they just give up investigating the dragons and cease to exist as far as the main story is concerned it's to the point that they feel like they were just forgotten by the writers but for now let's humor delphine's paranoia and get ready for this party at least the quest that we get out of it is one of the good ones sporting a new look courtesy of dummy mommy delphine sarian is ready to take on the embassy delphine can't show her face there unless someone recognizes her but sirian will have her skittish wood elf informant to sneak him out of the party using some credentials any backstory delphine managed to pull together sarian makes it into the party with no trouble i'll be honest i actually kind of like this quest in fact it's one of my favorite quests in skyrim i mean by virtue of the fact that it's not a dungeon crawler it pretty much lands near the top by default but there's more to it than that this is one of those rare quests that does a good job at effective world building from beginning to end without resorting to exposition dumps from npc dialogue we get to see the yarls and some of the other affluent members of skyrim high society doing more than just sitting on their thrones or standing adjacent to their leaders thrones more than that there's a lot of dialogue we can mine from different npcs most of which will change based on our progression and actions during the game this quest though doesn't really work conceptually if the player is well into their playthrough if the player has been running around for months laying dragons being named thane of all the holds grand master of all the guilds and ended the civil war different characters will come to recognize the player and might note how odd it is seeing them there thing is the thalmor would still somehow remain ignorant of who the player is this seems dubious and really at that point of progression delphine would certainly have less profile than the dragonborn this only further proves my point that the main quest is meant to be one of the first things the player does in the game this quest was clearly designed with the thought the player would still be a total nobody in the land of skyrim in syrian's case he'd become thane of morthal so yarrow ravencrone was something of a friend to him after she warned him how everyone in that room were a bunch of figurative snakes she went on to fake an old person episode throwing a fit about seeing real snakes when sarian asked her to make a distraction for him with everyone in the party agitated and distracted he slipped out with melbourne the mole behind enemy lines he was given access to the equipment he'd given the mole to sneak into the embassy funny thing about this mechanic is that the dialogue suggests you should choose very carefully what you give to melbourne but there's absolutely nothing stopping you from just giving him the entirety of your inventory money and all seeing as delphine's carriage is only a minute away from the place we'd give all of our stuff to him there's virtually no downside to doing it like this so that's exactly what i did if you do listen to the dialogue and only give melbourne some of your stuff you can give delphine the rest of your gear which she will have stored away in a chest that are in after the quest is done just remember to give melbourne some lock picks to smuggle in for you with all your gear there's really nothing stopping you from just going through and slaughtering your way to the prison where melbourne says the intel is probably being kept it's really the easiest and quickest way yeah the falmer guards can put up a decent fight but i mean come on this is skyrim there's nothing a little potion spam can't force its way through that's why i chose to disguise myself as a thalmor agent here's where two things inadvertently worked my favor playing as the gods favored race and having the unofficial patch installed so the disguise mechanic works on a spectrum of sorts more elven the better the disguise will work this is signaled by the guards very loudly voicing their thoughts and suspicions of the player as they move through the level in their disguise you might even ask to see your face a nord player will have to keep their distance and stick to the shadows as much as possible but a high-enough player can be a lot more brazen utilizing their elven pass this all leads up to the guard posted outside the prison any other race will have their cover blown by this guard but a high elf can convince the guard that they are there to relieve them of their watch once the dude is away the player can slip inside no problem well as long as i have the unofficial patch installed turns out this mechanic is completely busted in vanilla skyrim what a surprise the disguise does nothing no matter what race and the player will always get busted if they are spotted by the guards and bethesda never fixed this probably because the unofficial patch fixed it so most people don't know it's bugged in vanilla and if their cover is blown they'd just assume they bungled it up since there's virtually no consequences for slaughtering everyone no harm no foul now i call this quest whodunit 2.0 more out of affection than derision despite being a meme cheesy and all-around easy quest and oblivion whodunit will always have a special place in my heart because of how unique it was it tried to use the npc disposition system in a clever way and while the scripting in oblivion and npc ai just wasn't quite there it's still a fun quest to mess around with diplomatic immunity is definitely of a similar character the beginning as brief and stripped down as it is revolves around chatting with npcs and using social engineering to progress it would have been better if the party involved more than just a single room and the social engineering part required more effort on the part of the player but with the removal of disposition and speech mechanics from skyrim this would have been a lot trickier for the designers certainly not impossible but trickier still it would have been nice to see the designers try to utilize the smarter ai in skyrim and the lessons they'd hopefully learn from oblivion's rendition i imagine with just a few more rooms and deeper dialogue chains this quest could have been just as memorable as who'd done it the challenge of trying to move npcs into different rooms of the embassy while mining for intel and sneaking into restricted parts of the place looking for physical evidence would have been a lot more memorable than a teasing cocktail party and a completely optional stealth section that's outright broken in vanilla with the party in the embassy section behind us it's time to enter the prison while doing some snooping in the prison sarian comes across some thalmor intelligence reports ah yes the dossiers the first one is on delphine which pretty much just confirms her epic badass status they've been on her case for a while but she's still managed to evade them and disrupt some of their operations and i don't know this probably would have sounded a lot more impressive if we hadn't just strolled through their front door and managed to get our hands on this intel 10 minutes after arriving the second dossier the one on ulfric stormcloak is something of a fan favorite this is the evidence all freak detractors like to invoke when claiming his revolt is a sham the thalmor make note of how they had captured ulfric during the great war and worked him over by convincing him he'd given them intel that led to the capture of the imperial city turns out he didn't the imperial city fell before he actually gave them any information but they convinced him otherwise afterwards they made contact with him again which led to an outcome beneficial to the thalmor this coupled with the fact that the dossier calls all freaking asset is taken as proof that ulfric is actually working for the thalmor which is just nonsensical the language of the document fairly well indicates he'd been aiding them unknowingly ulfric's provocative actions in skyrim as a result of their meddling is all the thalmor needed for him to actually be useful people also seem to miss the fact that they call him a dormant asset no i think it's pretty obvious he's not a thalmor plant or whatever else what i do find interesting though is that the thalmor claimed to have stepped in at helgen because they didn't want ulfric executed how they stepped in is completely unknown it's pretty obvious they didn't summon alduin just to prevent the execution i almost feel like there might have been a scene missing from helgen because people like to point out how ulfric was not the first to be executed perhaps there were plans for the thalmor to step in during the execution have them delay all forks or something this line could have been written after the fact too as a way for bethesda to just lampshade why ulfric wasn't killed first i'm not sure but i find this line a lot more interesting than the misguided idea that ulfric was a thalmor stooge the entire time the final dossier pertaining to esburn doesn't really have anything interesting going on with it it's just more proof that the thalmor are coming up short on the dragon threat and got a real stick in their rear for killing all the blades this is the very fortunate tip we needed to keep the plot going i know stories require a certain level of suspension of disbelief to work but damn if it wasn't lucky delphine's extreme paranoia and hatred of the thalmor ended up putting us on the right path speaking of fortunate a britain rogue from the thieves guild is stuck in this prison being periodically tortured by the thalmor feeling pity for the guy sarien springs him from his restraints unfortunately the same can't be said for malburn whose cover was blown after helping sarian slip out of the party they drag him to the prison where they figure sarin must be and in an attempt to flush him out they kill malburn try as i might i was never able to rescue melbourne i tried a few times because if he lives he ends up having a small follow-up quest where we gotta help him kill a thalmor assassin so he can flee to morrowind but alas i also didn't want to use console commands fearing i'd break a script or something this quest is very script heavy and prone to breaking and save corruption i gotta question the thalmar's motives and methods here though so they kept this random breton rogue in the basement to torture for who knows how long so he could continue to repeat the same story to them but when they get their hands on a dude who had been undercover in their midst for a while helping to smuggle a spy into their intelligence department they just kill him right then and there so they had absolutely no interest in figuring out who he worked for or sirian for the matter considering they also attack him on site if this quest achieved one thing it was making the thalmer appear like a bunch of incompetent impulsive fools who just enjoy wanting cruelty for the sake of it i know that's not supposed to be the takeaway here but that's how their actions during the quest depict the mess i guess it's just some more of that good old-fashioned pluto narrative dissonance after making it out the back way it's back to delphine to let her know her paranoid instincts weren't at all accurate but they still incidentally led us to a breakthrough so blinded by her hatred for those damn elves delphine isn't quick to believe sarian's claims that they aren't behind the dragons while that sort of burning conviction delights serion it's not going to get them closer to the dragons so he tells her about esburn and her tune immediately changes sirian's a little put off that she's more excited about some 70 year old dude still kicking when the very thing her and the blades have been searching for for 300 years is standing right there next to her in any case being the blade lore master for the dragons it's fortunate esburn is still alive and in skyrim yeah i suppose that's one hell of a lead for them to follow up so the plan now is to immediately get to riften because surely the thalmor will be hunting down asburn as well if that prisoner already told them where he's located and again they've known about asburn's whereabouts for a while now long enough to write them down in the dossier so maybe they aren't in any rush to find this guy still not wanting to emerge from her basement hideaway delphine decides it's best to send sari into fat chestburn which i gotta say is insanely reckless here we just had to carve a bloody exit from the thalmor embassy now they definitely know what the pc looks like and is all about so that means now they should head to rifton alone a city of degenerate thieves and a corrupt government to track down her super paranoid blade's compatriot while the thalmar attracting him too yeah delphine is definitely the master planner here over in riften we get to meeting with brinyolf delphine's contact in riften and a high-ranking member of the thieves guild brinyoff isn't about to pass off information for free he wants us to handle a little dirty work first i'm not entirely sure why we can't just bribe him like every other npc speech check but our only options are to either pass the hardest speech check in the game or do his little frame up scheme to get introduced to the thieves guild as a compulsory candidate or at least that's the only route if you're doing what the game up until this point has been conditioning you to do and have just been letting the quest markers lead you by the nose for every quest i didn't even know there were alternate routes here until i read the uesp page for this quest but bruno's task here is optional we could also get the location of the ragged flagen from the argonian bar keeper next door and then head down into the rat ways to get the usual array of speech checks we'd normally find throughout the game once we persuade bribe or intimidate the barkeep of the flagon or dirge we are given the location of esburn further in the rat ways you could also completely ignore all of this and go straight for the rat ways there's no arbitrary locked doors or anything stopping you i find it interesting that the journal completes the objective to speak to brainioff if we talk to the argonian bar keeper instead leading me to think that either brinyal's part or the alternate paths were a second thought later addition which would explain why they are entirely disconnected now i appreciate these alternatives exist because i originally was going to go on a whole tangent about how this part of the main quest really takes a dump on player agency and ignores the whole role-playing aspect of the game but i don't have to do that unfortunately it's still not all sunshine and roses here either delphine explicitly directs us to bring off the all-knowing quest marker also directs us to bring off our journal explicitly names brinyoff thinking to ignore all three of these to preserve the moral standing of the pc isn't going to occur to most players to make things even trickier once we talk to britney off we're putting on the path to joining the guild a better way of handling this is giving us a dialogue option to outright refuse to do bringing office's dirty work and just tell him that we're going to find another way to acquire esperance's whereabouts this would signal to the player that there's alternatives here without the dialogue option though there's virtually nothing connecting the alternate paths to the main path and with the expectations and habits the game has been fostering in the players since the beginning of the game it's entirely fair that they'd think that this was yet another completely railroaded segment that they'd just have to roll with and reconcile with their character after the fact generally speaking i don't mind that the main quest has us interacting with one of the guilds it feels a bit arbitrary that only the thieves given the mages guild get this attention during the main quest but is an effective way of introducing the guilds to the player in a sort of natural way it does seem like a missed opportunity though not to have the companions involved with the questline at all considering slaying beasts for money is kind of their mo and there seems to be no limit on the number of bounties you're also putting out on dragons i don't know how the dark brotherhood could be given an introduction into the main quest but considering they ambushed and tried assassinating me a wholly improbable five times during this playthrough maybe that could have just been removed from random encounter system and turned into an actual plot point for the main story anyhow we do bring y'all's task of stealing a ring from one of the nearby stalls and reverse pickpocketing it into the inventory of some unfortunate dunmer vendor brainer offers a distraction in the market which judging by everyone's reaction to his snake oil salesman pitch makes me wonder how it even worked at all but it gives us enough cover that any character could complete the trivial task because of course it has to be simple and trivial even a mage needs to be able to complete this as a way of introducing the player to stealth and thieving mechanics something the tutorial on helgen doesn't really do well this isn't a bad setup but its timing is a little off i've been doing nothing but the main quest up until this point and even by now i was pretty well off cash-wise if bethesda is going to have a dedicated thieving tutorial like this it should have been done much earlier i understand this is an introduction to the thieves guild and the player can start this a little sooner but the main quest puts it right in the player's path as a result it just kind of sticks out and always felt like it didn't mesh with the flow of the events of the story after finishing his little frame up of the dunmer brinyoff gives one last go at trying to ensnare the player with his thieves guild pitch dropping some hints for the plot of the guild quest line and promising more golden morgue jobs even after telling brinyoff we aren't criminal scum and don't want to have anything to do with his organization he just calls us arrogant and spineless and tells us to join his organization down to the rat ways below the city uh-huh sure i'll get right on that chief sirian descends into the battles of rifton and snubs the entire thieves guild in their shabby watering hole as he makes his way to esperanza's location the thalmor have finally caught up with sarien perhaps being tipped off by what happened at the embassy if you got the info from the flag and says barkeep he will warn you that others were also looking for asburn so i guess that kind of explains the thalmar as a source for asburn's specific whereabouts in any event all paths reconvene at asburn's super secure door where sarian is able to name drop delphine to get him to open up he then gives a surprisingly brief doomer spiel about alduin the world leader returning before sarin gets to explain his dragonborn-ness with that explanation he's quick to join the anti-dragon coalition continuing the trend of npcs getting easier to convince of the increasingly crazier series of events that have occurred thus far then it's back to delphine for a heartwarming reunion and to discuss our next move but before we do that let's take a moment to discuss asperger i actually like him in terms of skyrim characters he's at least got some kind of character trait that doesn't make him exceptionally irritating for no discernible reason he was given the unfortunate dual purpose role of lore depositor and comedic relief i imagine the former is because the plot necessitates we have at least one person who knows what's going on and the latter is due to delphine being an abrasive bossy character because skyrim's quest design structure necessitated someone be in the unfortunate position of having to make decisions on the player's behalf but here's the thing as much as i like asburn and appreciate having him here i don't think it makes much sense that he's even here so we know why delphine has been hanging around skyrim these past few decades since the fall of the blades she made it her life's mission to be a pain in the ass for the thalmor and has been using her skills in espionage to do just that she's been successful in disrupting things for the thalmor enough to get penciled in the dossiers as their public enemy number one what has asburne been up to we don't know presumably he's been focused on staying hidden from the thalmor but the fact that he's still resorting to living in the dingy sewers of rift in behind lock and key and an alias decades after the fall of the bleeds makes me wonder why he hasn't given up at this point and i don't mean turning himself over to the thalmor i mean just giving up trying to keep himself all that hidden because why is he even in skyrim if i was an enemy of a political organization one of my major goals would be to escape that organization's jurisdiction this means leaving imperial and thalmor controlled land in that case he has three options morrowind hammerfell and black marsh granted all three got their own problems and i doubt anyone wants to be living in black marsh but surely hammerfell and morrowind could provide safer and more comfortable accommodations than the sewers of rifton being protected by the wishy-washy thieves guild if he had a proven purpose for staying in skyrim like in delphin's case then okay i can at least buy the improbability that the last two living members of the blades happen to both be living in skyrim right now but as i just said that's not the case so why is he here except that we needed an expert on dragon lore to be available to push the story forward the writers seem to think making asburn seem super paranoid would be enough to explain how he's managed to survive this long despite these persistent thalmor being on his trail but it doesn't the problem is that his knowledge is simply pertaining to the lore of the dragons which is one hell of a commodity to be versed in given recent events but i can't imagine he'd have that much of an opportunity to apply his old blades trade with the demise of his former employers and the dragons practically being extinct prior to the events of the game so we can't even furnish any sort of approximation for his story between the fall of the blades and the re-establishment of them which only further makes him seem like nothing more than a writing device but thank talos he survived this long living in sewers in hostile territory relying on sketchy folks like the thieves guild and possessing no marketable knowledge or skills to earn a living because ezra knows of the location of an ancient blades temple where a ton of dragon lore about alduin was recorded my dude i thought you were supposed to be an expert on dragons surely knowing the downfall of the king of the dragons would have been part of your core curriculum we get two options here travel to carth spire together or meet up with delphine and esburn there going there together just deposits them into our party as temporary companions which can be handy if you're a low level heading into the reach but i have to wonder if bethesda felt it prudent to give the player two powerful companions to act as escorts into the higher level to reach maybe that's why so few quests end up taking us there overall considering how so much of the game's content can technically be done in any order perhaps designers just didn't feel like having to contrive reasons for the players who constantly get escorts just in case they were going there at a low level however we decide to get there we make it to karth spire where we have to evict the force born squatters there's usually a random dragon that can spawn nearby which can often turn this fight into some chaotic triple threat match between us and our blade companions the high leveled force warren and the dragon i've seen a lot of players complain about this happening but personally i enjoy a good royal rumble in skyrim from time to time i was pretty decently leveled by this point but this fight still got me to sweat a bit which i always appreciate we make it into the temple and finish off the force worn only to come up against a pillar puzzle you know the drill with these i don't need to rehash the same arguments i will say though that i don't even really see the point in having the drawbridge or the pressure plate puzzles i guess it's meant to explain why nobody has been in the temple but the temple is locked up with a magical akafiri blood seal that only reacts to the blood of the dragonborn so if we got that why do we have the phoned in puzzles too so after sarian slices his hand like all the cool dudes and movies and shows do to draw their own blood skyhaven temple has its first blades and dragonborn inhabitants in centuries a lot of effort went into designing the temple and i kind of dig it there's detailed carvings on the walls that esburn takes the time to draw our attention to explaining their origins this feels a lot like the sarthal field trip during the mages college quest except more interesting because we're actually looking at original artwork exclusive to this place i also appreciate the little detail of delphine going around lighting the brazers though she didn't have a torch in her inventory here so she kind of just walked around panaming the whole time and using her indomitable will to just make the things light then we get to the titular the titular titular then we get to the titular is it titular titular or titrate tite's healer because it's tidal right let me get to the titular i think it's just titular you know this is gonna drop me insane i gotta look this up now titular titular titular titular that voice sounds like tetra titular alright got it then we get to the titular alduin's wall one of the wonders of the ancient world that had been lost at time remarkably well preserved expressing all kinds of stories to the use of allegories prophecies and so does it show how they defeated him isn't that why we're here all right he's up there dalfin the story was just getting good i don't understand if we're supposed to be identifying with delphine or esburn here the fact that esburn immediately cuts to the chase and starts giving us the cliff notes on the wall leads me to believe the writers really expected the players to be sitting there yawning and drooling on themselves as senile gramps rambles about some rocks and i don't know maybe they're right in assuming that about the audience that they themselves have been trying to cultivate but delphine hard cutting off asburn here always felt like some kind of self-aggrandizing dig against anyone who actually gives a [ __ ] about the world of elder scrolls with asburn being rudely cut off all delphine and therefore the plot cares about is the shout the ancient men used to defeat alduin a dejected asburn just offhandedly mentions the dragonborn prophecy which literally half the mural is about and is more important than players will realize here the whole prophecy recaps all the events of the previous games all the way back to arena and the great war between test 4 and 5 but there's nothing here to follow that up with if you aren't familiar with the events of the previous games you aren't going to get the references to them here and here's yet another wasted opportunity we can ask asburn about the wall but i guess being annoyed about delphine cutting his history lesson short he just chastises us for not paying attention and just says how we're the only person who can kill dragons and defeat aldwin cool so what was all that [ __ ] about a broken staff in a walking brass tower guess was all just silly nonsense that gramps was rambling on about again they could have at least scattered some lore books in this place related to those things so the curious player could make the connections themselves i guess the assumption was that the new players coming in with skyrim just couldn't be bothered with any of that and this half explained prophecy would be something to satiate old fans appetite for original lore and connections to previous games events weirdly enough relevant lore books do appear in the temple after we leave for a few days and delphine and esburn get unpacked but that doesn't help curious players intrigued by the wall the moment they see it i don't want to sound cynical here but the writing of this story so far seems very cynical it seems to constantly make assumptions about what the player will do think and want based on some disingenuous mental profile of the lowest common denominator player of the game of course the player isn't going to want to deviate from the main story and will stick to it to this point of course they aren't going to want to listen to the history of this place of course they don't care about the connections this story is supposed to have to the greater lore of the franchise give them a strong leader like delfina tell them what to do and throw grandpa as burning for some comedic relief it's hard not to meet cynicism with an equal degree of cynicism especially when the game is making disingenuous character assumptions about me as a player that doesn't really change the further along we get in this story but we're just about done dealing with delphine so we can at least feel like agents in our own story again with the blades back in business delphine asked sarian to bring back anybody he thought had potential for the bleeds sensing the perfect opportunity to make bayner the bad somebody else's problem he immediately offered him up as a sacrifice i mean offered him the opportunity to join the worthy noble and prestigious order are you sure i'll need to ask them to take an oath to leave their old life behind and stay here from now on uh when suck what do you need to take okay he's all yours no refunds but with vayner gone there was a huge gap in saren's staff like i said earlier i ended up giving in and recruiting lydia the house carls just turned out to be a cut above the rest of the followers and i was really tired of deadweight companions by this point having never actually completed the task of rebuilding the blades before i was committed to doing it this run this meant i needed three followers to offer up to acting grandmaster delphine to be turned into members of the bleeds after doing that asburn offers a radiant quest to go hunt a dragon with my blade companions which leads to another quest that just requires handing over a dragon scale and a dragon bone so asburn can make a special potion that makes dragons do 25 percent less melee damage to the player permanently not too shabby but kind of worthless for a ranged character i would have appreciated 25 less damage overall but the fact that the bonus is permanent and the reasons for the potion are items that i'm usually carrying around to vendor at some point anyways yeah it's pretty cool it's also the only potion in skyrim that gives the player a perk something i always appreciate because i'm a passive abilities kind of guy yeah i'm one of those types if you're curious about who else got turned over eventually i let lydia take it easy enjoying your retirement from adventuring by joining the blades i also handed over the house call from morthal because he was readily available i had no use for him and i just won the quest on asap rebuilding the bleeds doesn't really give us much else we get a cool looking base of operations and the place progressively looks more lively as we recruit more and the place fills with more furniture and clutter but skyhaven temple is too out of the way to ever be a useful base for the player as well it has no amenities like a brewing stand enchanting table and a forge for the players crafting needs it also has no safe storage space for the player it's just a place to come get a dragon hunting blessing from esburn and maybe ask a former follower to assist a player out in the field as much as it bothered her to ask delphine admitted they needed the greybeards's help with this next part if there really was a shout capable of killing alduin then they'd be the ones to know about it well maybe who knows it has been thousands of years since that shout has been useful and the greybeards are all about peace and tranquility so who's to say they haven't committed to disarmament and purged the most dangerous shouts from the world also we did get this from some wall that is literally half prophecy so who's to say the shout ever existed at all maybe those old nord heroes were just really good at shouting in any case asking the greybeards seems the most logical thing to do so that's what sarian does but sticking to the concerned dad characterization bethesda saddled irongear with he chastises us for hanging out with the bad kids where did you learn of that who have you been talking to there's serious beef between the blades and the greybeards and arngir insists it's because the blades have historically tempted the dragonborn towards a path of power and glory i mean just look at tiber septim all that carnage and chaos during his campaigns as we get further into this thing we will see that maybe there's another explanation for the rift between the greybeards and the blades so after aaron gear berates us for just being a puppet for the blades god i sure do love when games deny me choices and then have its writing criticize me for not making choices irongear admits they don't know much about the shout because it was an evil hate-filled shout when someone shouts they in essence become that shout so using this hate-filled shout makes someone become that hatred and seeing as that's the antithesis to the way of the voice they just let it be forgotten there's some interesting real world philosophical and linguistic grounds to be explored here that skyrim will absolutely not touch it's kind of like a modern ubisoft game that introduces some topics with an interesting premise and then proceeds to make no artistic social or political comments whatsoever with it it's an attempt to appeal to a much broader audience while curtailing complaints of i don't want politics in my video games which is lame misguided and maybe just a bit duplicitous unless the game is going to avoid any sort of depictions of conflict whatsoever historical social and political parallels are pretty much inevitable video games like any form of art or communication by their nature are open to interpretation use a certain color scheme and suddenly there's a reference to a real life event give an npc a certain name and then that character might be linked to a real life person it's very easy for this to happen and it's entirely possible for it to be accidental in order to make something completely sanitized if any possible references would require the world's biggest encyclopedia and a crystal ball this is why looking for supporting evidence and asking about authorial intent is so important this is where developers like ubisoft frustrates me in their case they make a game about the crusades during the peak of real-life middle eastern conflict and then say nothing turning it into a weird techno pseudoscience conspiracy story about two factions that were badly misrepresented in their game they were so against saying something poignant that they turned the story into an obvious fantasy that couldn't have any sort of historical or political connections skyrim doesn't go full ubisoft on us mostly because its references are so subtle they might not even be references at all i don't want to get into the civil war conflict in this part but it's worth bringing up here because i think it helps prove my point that some people at bethesda really wanted to say something but that was ultimately lost somewhere either self-censorship or a lack of resources and commitment to the task in a game with a civil war as its opening conflict racial and religious tensions throughout the entire province and a sketchy faction like the thalmor calling the shots it's really not a big stretch to think someone at bethesda has something to say about hate speech and the temptation for self-censorship what that message ultimately is though we won't know because right after r gear gets done telling us how this shout is evil and should be forgotten he puts us on the literal path to finding it again he figures it's time we talk to parthenax at the third of the world to get there we need to make it past the magical storms that constantly blanket the path to the peak of the mountain having demonstrated good form with his voice thus far aren't geared judges syrian fit for wielding the clear sky shout so he can shout away the storms for a bit the shout also works on normal clouds and storms which holy crap talk about a useful power the ability to make storms go away why aren't more nords versed in this shout i imagine this could come in handy in a province prone to inclement weather or during some natural disasters say a giant storm that wiped out a whole city i really can't believe the graves are just sitting on knowledge like this are they actually the good guys here if they just let a whole city fall into the ocean when combined they probably had the power to save it the fact that greybeards were even allowed to continue to live after such a display of gross neglect is a rare example of nordic restraint i understand their brand images we don't involve ourselves in the world below but that sort of high-handed policy seems like something that would have definitely earned the ire of the nords of skyrim especially when they were pretty up in arms after the great collapse and were on the hunt for anyone to blame for the whole episode maybe people wouldn't be incensed enough to march up the mountain and burn high rothgar down but i would imagine this would have damaged their image enough to at least make people entirely forget about the greybeards but no by the time we come along the nords throughout skyrim still hold the graveyards in the highest regards even though people have long forgotten that shouting was something all nords are supposed to be gifted with still i appreciate this detail and i believe it was intentional because the great beards aren't actually supposed to be the good guys they share a lot of the same trappings as your typical generic good guy factions of standard fantasy but details like standing by as a whole city falls into the ocean just because their philosophy forbids them from getting involved gives them a hard shove towards the morally grey camp it drives well with what irongear has been telling us and he even says that sometimes doing nothing is the hardest path to take but it's hard to believe the nords would still hold them in such high regards after all these years of not doing anything for skyrim especially now that a civil war is raging and a lot of people are asking what it even means to be a nord there absolutely should be some staunch detractors of the greybeards this just makes it seem like the greybeards have a reputation that's perpetuated by nothing more than writer necessity after shouting down the storms we make it to parthenox who turns out to be a dragon really the name should have been a dead giveaway but the twist worked on a lot of players myself included this meeting was so unexpected and done so well in comparison to what we've seen yet that parthenex immediately found a place in many players hearts he does have a certain charm exclusive to those who vowed to correct the error of their ways and find a more virtuous life in their reformed years he was also the one who taught the ancient nords how to use the thumb in order to rebel against alduin and his tyrannical dragon cult thousands of years ago i kind of like this story within a story we got going here that draws many parallels to each other we got a story of an ancient rebellion against a reportedly real bad regime in a game with an active civil war that's nowhere near as cut and dry it's meant to make the player wonder things like what makes a rebellion just are the accounts of the dragon wars reliable or are we just hearing the narrative of the victorious nords what can we learn from that conflict to find a solution to this one or at least i imagine that's what they were hoping the player would get out of this it's hard to tell when you get stuff like this right after delphine shouting boring at asburn maybe i'm just reading into things a bit too much here now i'm all about subtlety in stories and keeping things cloaked in ambiguity so the audience can draw their own conclusions but when you want to do something like that to avoid spoon-feeding the purpose of the story you kind of need some total consistency so far this story has been just all over the place and it's really hard for me to tell if i should be taking this thing seriously or if i'm really just giving the writers too much credit this could also just be that standard bethesda thing where one designer wanted a really interesting serious story and another designer just wanted a cool story about killing dragons because here's the thing if there was a lot of thought put into creating a very grey ambiguous and dare i say intelligent story i pretty much immediately forget it once the gameplay elements creep into the conversation the most obvious surface level thing the writers expect the audience to take away from this whole exchange is that the dragons aren't as big dumb and evil as they had originally thought to do this they put parthenx here to wax philosophical with his use of words we don't understand he goes into a philosophical tangent about the consequences of trying to save the world and that maybe the world cannot be safe after all that's what the ancient nords tried to do but all they managed to do is send alduin forward in time iron gear raises a similar point and says that might mean the world is just meant to end with alduin this has some genuinely interesting implications especially against all the people telling us how it's our destiny to save the world and how we are chosen by akatosh to slay alduin we get a whole prophecy and the bleeds pushing us towards action parthenex and armgear on the other hand are inclined to stick to the teachings of the way of the voice and frame events here as inevitability who to listen to this would be really profound if we were allowed to actually make decisions here but the story assumes we just want to save the world and so parthenx and r gear are made to immediately contradict their words through their actions they raise these interesting points but before we can even agree with them they are telling us how to proceed to save the world had they given us an opportunity to embrace the balancing inactivity of the way of the voice here i'd be more impressed and i know i keep harping on it but the dragons being shown as intelligent just cannot get past my most basic mental filters when every dragon i fight seems practically suicidal in how they engage me in battle no amount of words in a fake language i don't understand will make me think anything more of these creatures they're just big dumb lizards needed to unlock my shouts nothing more speaking of that language parthenx just uses it to teach us the basic fire breath shout half the dragons we've fought have been using it's not even the crazy stream the dragons spew just a little poof the graveyards just taught us a shout to literally changed the weather and all we get out of parthenox is a shout that spits out a little fireball it's like if you travel to this great furniture craftsman everyone says is a genius and for your trouble he just gives you a basic chair you could have purchased at walmart meanwhile the people who learned from this guy just finished giving you a freaking herman miller looking back at my footage i realized i skipped going to the mages college and went right for septimus's outpost unless you've got prior knowledge to septimus's whereabouts you aren't going to find any direction to him outside of the book or agroshoot gives you at the college you can't even find the book lying around elsewhere in the game only two copies exist one at the college and one at his outpost speaking to r and guerra esburn just directs the player straight to college so if you're a new player and you don't feel like joining the college and don't want to look up where to go well tough [ __ ] at least the first section with the thieves guild had alternate routes to circumvent getting involved with brinyolf as roundabout and disconnected as they were what's funny is that even playing as a mage i couldn't be bothered to join the mages college at this time and have to be subjected to 10 minutes of orientation before i'd be free to talk to the librarian sure meta gaming and circumventing the college meant i had to miss out on some lines from my favorite orc librarian but such as the price to pay with skyrim's main quest meeting up with septimus puts us on the path for completing discerning the trans mundane a strange detour for those who take it and never have played the dragonborn dlc and don't get the connection between the dragonborn and hermaeus mora we'll shove that discussion for a while but let's take a look at blackreach blackreach is the first thing skyrim defenders will point to when someone says skyrim's dungeons are boring while i'm not looking to die on that particular hill i will say black reach is a cool area that concentrates the skyrim formula into an enjoyable 2 hour experience if the player hasn't been to dwemer ruins yet they're in for a real surprise and might even think all dwemer ruins are like it there's something to be said about putting your best foot forward and considering how most of the main quest thus far has been some of the weakest stuff the game has to offer there's a lot to consider with blackreach the first thing to consider is that it exists at all blackreach wasn't originally going to be put into the game but joel burgess lead dungeon designer on skyrim and nate perkypyle an environmental artist working on skyrim ended up getting it slotted in late in development brigast was also responsible for vilvaran in oblivion which had a very similar last minute edition story as blackreach burgess actually used vilverin as a proof of concept that ended up leading to the creation of the mayroon's razor dlc and spawning the dungeon design philosophy that instructed the designs of fallout 3's dungeons so when people say black reaches one of the most memorable parts of the game that's the reason why it was born from the same creative spirit as some of the best exploration parts of oblivion in fallout 3. the fact that it wasn't planned was also why it never appeared in promotional material and had very little connection to the rest of the game by the time it was implemented there wasn't enough time to cede many references to it so it remained a mysterious surprise for the player which is another reason for its lasting appeal the idea for blackreach originated with bruce nedsmith years before in some obscure lore about an underground dwemer highway network that would link all the dwemer cities together like i said earlier there was potential in such an idea for implementing fast travel alternatives unfortunately blackreach was never going to be that ambitious considering it was a late addition and because i doubt there was much thought being paid to fast travel alternatives from the dev team in general as a result only a handful of dwemer dungeons connect to it and none of them would actually shave down travel time kind of defeating the purpose of an underground highway as well the player needs the attunement sphere septimus gives them probably to protect quest scripting this further limits how useful the traveling mechanic ultimately could be i'm curious how many players accidentally stumbled into blackreach from one of the other dungeons and not through the way elder knowledge directs through alften i imagine accidentally finding black reach through one of the other dungeons would be an even cooler discovery even if it's not going to function as a handy underground highway for the player it's still one of the more useful areas of the map it's a great source for many resources including soul gems and ore there's plenty of loot to be found that implausible hidden dragon another impromptu addition by brigas and lots of scenic areas to farm reddit up points after exploring black reach it's off to the tower of mazark to get that elder scroll this introduces the most extravagant non-puzzle in the game much more flashy and much less mentally taxing than the pillar puzzle of carth spire the dwemer are described as tricky and cryptic with their technology-defying comprehension but this device is literally just pressing the most recently activated button until another button is activated until the elder scroll is copied and the master scroll is presented for the taking if the dwemer were so cagey why is one of the most valuable devices they've ever constructed so easy to use why is a device capable of copying the information in an elder scroll just sitting there waiting for anyone who can press a few buttons i suppose possessing a blank lexicon cube is a decent level of security but i'd really expect a device as powerful as this and housing an artifact as valuable as this to be a little more opaque here's the other thing i'm left wondering about if blackreach was not part of the original plan for the game was the quest to obtain an elder scroll added along with it or was that already in place what about septimus and hermeasmora was the tower of mazark just going to be a part of a different dwemer ruin i don't really have any answers these are just questions that i'm left wondering speaking of septimus i'm gonna let our wild boy there sweat it out a bit while i head back to the mountain with parthenex perhaps because he's a dragon and dragons have some kind of connection to the flow of time and akatosh and a lot of other lore stuff or perhaps because he's a big lizard with an even bigger snoot parth knows sirian has a scroll as he's going on about time quaking from the scroll and the bones of the world at his fingers sarian just goes ahead and reads the scroll at the swirly bit of air that got wrecked by the last time a scroll was right in that location and can we just stop for a moment and appreciate just how reckless this is whipping out an elder scroll and looking directly at it like we just saw how septimus went mad from reading one which is why he wanted us to use a device the drummer made to circumvent the drm the gods put on the elder scrolls so they can make copies of scrolls without the risk of going mad or going blind knowing all that the pc just goes alright time to whip out my elder scroll like i'm checking my instagram a good thing the dragonborn got that divine favor otherwise he probably would have turned to ash or something from doing this i know this cutscene has been mocked and meme to death in other videos so i'm not going to touch on that much but this cutscene truly is all sorts of jank and i cannot imagine the amount of spaghetti scripting needed for it to work in this engine i'll give bethesda credit for their marked improvement in their cutscene technology and techniques even from fallout 3 and especially from oblivion but when a cutscene is more than just people standing around talking or a cutscene involving more than two actors things really start to fall apart sure one-on-one conversations still would occasionally have its own jank especially with repetitive idle animations or active npcs pathfinding into the player or through a conversation but it's a noticeable improvement over what we had in oblivion i'd wait sure 90 of the conversations in skyrim function just fine though i wish interacting with shop keeps and service npcs was more streamlined like in oblivion with dedicated buttons for certain things like opening the barter screen having to thumb through a list of dialogue options is kinda obnoxious especially with certain npcs whose list is loaded with exhausted topics from quests long since completed so we learned the visceral words of dragon rend from the nordic heroes of the marethic era and just as parthenox said the three heroes couldn't slay alduin and had to use the squirrel to send him forward in time knowing full well he'd probably still be a threat to the world in the future alduin also outs parthenax as a traitor here just in case anyone had any doubts as to parthenax's claims in present day we get ejected back to present day once the magen greybeard robes finishes lamenting about being forced into using this scroll and alduin shows up at the mountain he's come to tell us that he's sick of our crap and has come to send us to savangard which uh unless alduin has special powers to send the souls of those he's killed to savangard he's not going to be sending a high elf there i imagine this is just one of those throwaway lines but the fact that the first showdown with our main antagonist is already resorting to throwaway lines really says a lot about how invested bethesda really was in making aldun a good antagonist i beat on mad car cameron being an underdeveloped antagonist but he at least had his speeches when we first got to paradise and his commentaries to flesh him out alduin doesn't get anything he's the firstborn of akatosh and wants to consume the world this conflict is more man vs nature than anything else given the essence of what dragons are lore wise and gameplay-wise fairy enough i can get behind something a bit more cosmic horror but his presentation is more flat than obviously intentionally vague and that no doubt contributes to players sleepwalking through the whole story the ensuing fight would be kinda decent by virtue of nothing more than the fact that alduin is not scripted to chase after random goats on the side of the mountain and will stay focused on the fight also there's adequate space and cover for the fight to play out but we just got dragon ran to permanently ground all dragons that get in our way alduin included so after shouting the most primordial slur the ancient nords could engineer alduin gets stuck to the ground like a fly stuck to a glue trap and this forever will trivialize dragon fights truly nothing of value is lost here and the fact that the shout recharges before its effect wears off allowing the player to permanently stun lock dragons i'm led to believe that the designers probably knew just how bad dragon fights were and decided to take the route of if players want to subject themselves to a fair fight they just won't use a shout because shouts are on a universal cooldown it does mean we're giving up any other shouts if we commit to the dragonrend tactic but i mean like who cares i can't think of a single shout worth using against dragons prior to dragonrend i just stuck to slinging spells at them because of the limited range and or effect every shout had against dragons the siren and lydia beat on alduin while parth flies around and pretends to help until alduin taps out and suddenly dragonren no longer works on him he reminds us that no mortal can kill him and he takes off we are presented with three options talk to either esburn irongear or parthenax for ideas on how to proceed this is a weird setup because we are already on parthenox's mountain with him just a few feet in front of us why would we bother going to the other two even with fast traveling we'd still have to wait through at least two loading screens and run around the fortresses looking for the correct npcs or we could just take 10 steps and talk to parth this is such a no-brainer i wouldn't be surprised if most players had simply forgotten that it's technically a pick one of three on the surface the choice doesn't seem to matter as all three roads lead to the scheme of trapping a dragon at whiterun and interrogating it on alduins's whereabouts but all three conversations grant different perspectives of historical events factions and the player i'll start with that last bit if we approach iron gear or asburn and explain the situation the player is the one to suggest that they try interrogating one of alduins's allies if we talk to parth the dragon suggests it and the course of action it's interesting to see the player make the suggestion because it doesn't seem like a very logical thing to conclude sure i guess since parth turned it's possible another dragon could become a turncoat but it seems like a long shot parth suggesting it lends the solution instant credibility though he'd know best on this subject after all the solution here would have been to either have the dialogue option walk us through the logic of this idea or just have asburn and r gears spell it out though asburn isn't supposed to know parthenox's true identity but more on that in a second framing the idea with a logical argument makes it not seem like a crazy hail mary the more interesting stuff here is something the player is probably not going to pick up on unless they save and reload and talk to all three contacts because all three of them discuss the same events and follow similar conversation paths the differences in their dialogue are easier to detect asburn describes the ancient akaviri as crusaders who came to skyrim to cleanse it of its dragon infestation irongear on the other hand describes a period of time with some nostalgia and caustically uses the phrase wipe them all out meanwhile parth chooses to focus on his friend who'd been trapped at the palace and how he had to watch his friend go crazy from captivity and loneliness three sources with three perspectives on the same event it's a great way to add nuance to the story but the problem is how the quest is structured like i said most players are going to automatically talk to parth who has the most heartfelt retelling of this period of time but also the most personal and potentially the most biased and unreliable perspective depending on your personal beliefs on the subject by doing this they ensured most players would be biased towards poth's perspective only players who do a lot of legwork and are very attentive to the wording here will get the full picture as a result bethesda's efforts are immediately squandered by nothing more than poor objective placement and training the player to be over lined on following quest markers and fast traveling as far as the player has been concerned up until this point all three of these factions have been interchangeable sure delphine and irongear got some pointed complaints about the other faction but nothing has gated progression or even indicated that we should be thinking more deeply about who we align with this is pretty much the fork in the road for these factions but this part doesn't really signal that and the player can be blindsided by what comes next if the player goes to esburn they find out that the blades learn that the leader of the greybeards is a dragon not just any dragon but one of alduin's chief lieutenants during the war as a result they insist the player kills parthenx with the context of the previous topic provided the akaviri crusaders cleansed skyrim of its dragon infestation this request doesn't seem completely out of left field like when it shows up later after the peace council if the player hasn't talked to esburn here if they don't talk to asburn before that meeting then we get the orders from delphine who makes a much more pragmatic and much less convincing argument delphine insists he dies because he might go and join his old master even though parthenox just watched us whip alduins ass on that mountain yeah i prefer the argument esburn gives just because he betrayed alderman doesn't mean he's absolved of his crimes he was one of the worst persecutors of mortals there's a reason he was alduins a second does switching sides in living a life of peace excuse someone from war crimes that's the argument here and it's a compelling one i believe it would be like if martin borman or another high-ranking nazi official defected late into world war ii and helped defeat hitler in the nazi regime should that assistance have granted him immunity from prosecution after the war ended the problem is that we just don't have enough diegetic details about alduin the dragon war the dragon cults and the age of the akaviri crusaders there's lore about it hidden in books but most players just don't have the requisite knowledge necessary to beef up the blades case so let's correct that right now i'm going to make the case the blades failed to present let's start with aaron gears testimony his defense rests on three arguments one parthenax already paid for his crimes by betraying alduin teaching the ancient nords how to use shouts and then serving as master of the greybeards and teaching his followers the way of the voice a lifestyle dedicated to using the power of the voice to find inner peace and abstain from using power to control others two aldon was just following orders all the dragons followed aldwin back when he ruled none of the dragons had a choice three nobody is without guilt and therefore no one is fit to judge parthenex and deny him his ability to repent and reform tackling argument one first this is definitely the strongest of the three it's unclear if mortals would have been able to overthrow the tyrannical regime of alduin if it wasn't for parthenex's assistance it seems unlikely but kines's intervention then and akatosh's intervention now hints that there could have been other forces at play that would have led to alduin's eventual downfall anyhow there's no denying though the expediency of parthenax's help going on to teach the greybeard and perpetuating the way of the voice was certainly a noble endeavor but we will see when we get to talk to parthenex that this may have not been as altruistic as irongear likes to think parthenox had a certain vested interest in trying to find a way to reform his ways and we can say he succeeded to the benefit of mortal kind and that could be a valid argument for clemency if the argument is being based on a utilitarian basis but aren't gear's second argument is not utilitarian but based on some objective moral statement as well being a beneficiary of parthenax's way of the voice iron gear is not an impartial opinion here the fact that he never made mention of parth's role in the war until the player brings it up at this point casts suspicion on arnie's motives returning to a utilitarian argument what utility has the way of the voice given to mortals it taught tiber septim how to use his voice to conquer it armed ulfric storm cloak to go kill the high king of skyrim and the grievance did nothing for thousands of years as chaos and turmoil broke out across skyrim including the great collapse when they likely had the means to help how beneficial has parthenex truly been for the realm of mortals since the dragon war the only thing that really seems to hold up against any scrutiny is that parthenox has truly reformed this seems pretty well demonstrated but when we get to talking to parthenox himself he seems to cast doubt on this but he has spent thousands of years waiting on the mountain for alduin to return and has spent that time quietly meditating and not flying around pillaging villages that's a pretty well proven track record for any mortal and when alduin returned parth got right back into the fight by helping the player defeat him for good ok let's move on to argument 2. parthenox was just following orders forgive me but i need to return to real-life historical references here because we don't have an exhaustive chronicle of all legal rulings in tamriel i can't really base this on tamrielic law if such a thing even exists legal courts existed in daggerfall but yeah for obvious reasons bethesda dropped that mechanic going back to the nuremberg trials god i hope this video doesn't get demonetized for all these sensitive references the courts landed successful convictions by arguing that the nazis had been in violation of natural law my american audience will probably recognize natural law by the phrase life liberty and the pursuit of happiness the deciding argument was that natural law supersedes positive law which are laws enacted by society or government therefore it becomes not only a moral duty but a legal duty to refuse to obey any law or order that demands one to violate the naturally bestowed rights of another person natural law has been instrumental in the declaration of independence of the united states the declaration of the rights of men and of the citizen of france the universal declaration of human rights of the united nations and the european convention on human rights of the council of europe in conclusion he was just following orders is a terrible argument to make in a modern court of law we have no real basis to say if natural law is codified in tamriel but i'm going to invoke my own judgment here and say it holds up okay third argument we are without guilt therefore we cannot judge parthenex this is a deeper argument than you might realize and is pretty much why we have trials by jury now there is some moral ground to make this argument especially if we go back to what rngear said about killing parthenx and how it will deny him his ability to atone for his crimes this argument is pretty much i don't recognize the authority of this court i don't really have much of a counter argument to make except that the game won't allow me to assemble a jury and hold a proper trial i guess i could make the claim that this is an ad hoc tribunal with four of us sitting as judges me delphine esprit and arm gear there's enough precedence to say that irregular courts can still render judgment especially in international cases covering matters of human rights violations so yeah sorry aren't gear the authority of this court still kinda holds okay it's time to let the defendant testify if we approach him until the blades want him dead he's not at all surprised and explains how he can see it from their perspective he insists you cannot trust a dovah because dragons were created to dominate they are creatures of pure power and even in his case it took thousands of years of meditation to keep his natural inclinations at bay not a day goes by where he isn't tempted to start conquering uh yeah too bad our gear can't have that stricken from the record parthenox makes a compelling moral argument that it's demonstrative of true character strength to resist one's latent evil nature than it is to be devoid of it entirely unfortunately that's still not a defense for his actions during the war so it's verdict time i do like parthenx he's probably the most well-defined character we get in this game i mean i just spent however many minutes debating his guilt and the nature of his character he ends up being a true bro to the end and delphine's fears of him defecting to aldo inside were completely frivolous granted if he lives he will assume the power vacuum alduin creates but that's implied to be a good thing because he wants to teach the other dragons the way of the voice failing that i'm guessing he'd at least act as the dragon police force and try to keep his own in line at the end of the day this is a pretty decent moral choice the sort that this game has been sorely lacking it is presented terribly and it's no surprise so many players sleep on it and just let it boil down to parthenox is my boy and delphine is a [ __ ] but being someone who believes in the letter of the law i can't help but admit the case against him is pretty solid not infallible but solid enough to convince me that he's guilty i'd prefer a more lenient punishment in this case maybe even commute most of it on account of him having sat on a mountain for thousands of years and helping to defeat alduin again but unfortunately the game doesn't really provide that kind of nuance and frankly i don't know how to come up with a more meaningful punishment for an immortal creature that doesn't appreciate time the same way mortals do like what good is locking up a dragon for a few years it's immortal but this isn't me passing judgment it's sirian and as far as he can tell the dragon is guilty guilty but not necessarily deserving of punishment true he would be an outcast from the blades if he didn't deliver the punishment their way but there might be more to this than just what a couple of old codgers believe he's going to wait and see for now he's got another dragon he has to catch first yarl ballen isn't thrilled with the idea of catching a dragon in his tinderbox of a city but because he's a bro to rival parthenx in this story he tentatively agrees under the condition we get talius and ulfric to agree to a truce he thinks if he has a dragon burning his city one of those two scoundrels would seize the opportunity to seize his neutral city he suggests we get the greybeards to host a war summit because they are about the only people who have enough writer-induced clout to pull something like this off after talking to r gear the implacable greybeards shrug and agree to finally do something for skyrim seeing as we're not talking about the civil war in this video there's not a whole lot to discuss with this next part getting all freaking tullius to attend is a foregone conclusion with the greybeards involved one of the generals will always agree and with that the other one will too if the graveyards are angered over the player killing parthenax the players then forced to end the civil war first a rare display of consequences of the rare chance to make actual story decisions in this game but those choices and consequences don't end there because then we got the negotiations bethesda put a lot of work into this negotiation sequence going so far as to make a hidden scoring system that measures how fair the resulting treaty is which affects the reward from the quest there's so many variables involved here that going through them one at a time would take probably close to an hour so to make a long explanation short the system here looks at what holds a faction has gained our loss during the civil war what side the dragonborn has been supporting and the different decisions that come up during the negotiations the further along the civil war progresses the harder the negotiations will be for the players favorite side it's a neat system that is sadly completely lost on players who are not interested in the civil war or are doing the main quest before tackling the civil war if you want to get the best experience here get some mileage on the civil war first it's an opportunity to really turn skarm on its head which admittedly won't change that much except a yarl some side npcs and the color of the guards but like i said we ain't talking about the civil war and its inadequacies here today following a successful truce r gear asks the most pertinent question that is so obvious to the player that it's almost hilarious we haven't been able to ask it ourselves earlier how are we going to lure a dragon 2 dragon's reach fortunately asburn and delphine invited themselves to the summit and esburn gives us a shout that is just the name of a dragon that will probably come to see why the dragonborn who just whipped alduin is calling for him if you haven't gotten the order to kill parthenx you'll be getting it here from delphine who as i said earlier does a terrible job of convincing the player of the validity of the charges if you want to retain the loyalty of the blades you're going to have to kill parthenex asap because once you get to the final zones of the main quest harth will be pardoned if he's still alive troops in hand it's back to dragon's reach to catch a dragon we get another sequence that makes us question the intelligence of these things as odaving blunders right into a pretty obvious trap eventually fortunately the untrustworthy dragons are good for their word and after he tells us about the portal to saving guard at skulldolphin alduin uses he informs us he can fly us to the secluded fortress once we free him recognizing the red dragon holds all the cards sorry and frees a polite beast figuring he could just glue him in place with dragon rend if he tries to get cute but all is copacetic and the two of them fly off into the mountains together after sarian loads up on a stupid number of potions because the next part is an absolute slog if it feels like i'm rushing this section that's because i am if you aren't doing the civil war the peace council is just a long unskippable cutscene capturing odaving is truly one of the most anti-climactic events in the main story and the ruins of skuldophan are honest to yesmir the worst nordic ruins in the game it is a virtual wasteland of empty brown space aside from the nice little scenery up front most of where we crawl through is the most visually bland environment the main story has sent us through it is so empty that the uesp article on it resorts to reporting all the locations of mountain flowers in its exterior cell yeah and when i say crawl i mean that quite literally we face off against nothing less than four dragons though two are technically optional just don't accidentally aggro them easier said than done because this place is absolutely crawling with high level draugr who will use their height advantages to let you know you are definitely not welcome here the lack of covering these wide open wastes of stone is especially annoying and is why i brought so many potions so i could just soak up damage and spam spells the temple connected to the complex is just as barren and full of high level draugr literally the only thing of value here is the word wall with the summon storm shout a shout of questionable utility in a fight because it indiscriminately hits targets friend and foe alike and has a painfully slow cooldown frankly the only thing of value in this temple were the dragger themselves who i farmed for high level souls to fill my soul gems for the massive amounts of enchanting grinding i was gearing up for after dispatching all the draugr the dragon priests and the dragons it's time to enter the portal to savangard probably the only interesting looking art asset in this whole disappointment of a penultimate arena on the other side we find ourselves in sauvengard the nordic afterlife this place is second only to blackreach in its visual flair and almost makes up for how god-awful the previous segment was the music is fantastic the sky is appropriately otherworldly and the whole place has a tangible sense of dread and foreboding as alduin prowls the mist he brought to the place to drain and demoralize the souls of the nords who have fallen during the civil war we get this sense of being stalked and hunted as we move through the mist and make it to the hall of valor standing at the giant whalebone bridge is a beast of a man's spirit he challenges our worthiness for entering the hall the only way nords know how to measure someone by beating them in combat after proving our worth we make it into the hall and find some of the great nordic legends like jurgen winkler whom well let's just say it's true what they say about meeting your heroes this is yet again a pretty interesting and entirely unique environment so i'm kind of glad i'm not ignored because if this is what i had to look forward to for all eternity i'd probably ask to be sent to the great empty void of non-existence after a couple of days standing there waiting for us are the three ancient nord heroes who defeated alduin long ago and were responsible for sending him forward in time they are here at the ready itching to meet alduin for one last battle combined the four of us are powerful enough to shout away his evil miss then kill him once and for all that's when we realize we aren't trapped in here with alduin aldon is trapped in here with us alone we'd decimated what was left of his force at skull dauphin and now we're here to slay him in the place that he was meant to die in for you see this was all meant to be ever since the civil war broke out in skyrim we were meant to fulfill the ancient prophecy we were meant to bring to a close a conflict spanning back to the dragon war itself a conflict even older than that in fact the whole time we were just another pawn in a conflict older than time itself are you ready i'm about to explain what skyrim story is actually about let us begin pretty much all creation myths begin with a new stasis and panama change i'm going to make a much longer story short and just tell you that akatosh has descended from a noob and lorkhan is descended from panama skyrim players might recognize the name shore that's another name for lorkhan i knew in patamai were or are always in conflict the many events that have occurred since existence began can be seen as these two battling and i'm not talking on a metaphysical level here i mean they are literally fighting specifically they or their descendants have been fighting over nirn and its inhabitants for thousands and thousands of years let's focus on one of those conflicts the dragon wars so to recap the dragons were once revered as gods to the early north of skyrim and the dragon priests acted as intermediaries between the godlike dragons and men eventually aldwin first born of akatosh and the first dragon decided to reject the mandate his defined father gave him and went conquering the world for himself the dragon cult became a tyrannical instrument with parthenox second born of akatosh and younger brother to alduin acting as his lieutenant committing untold atrocities against the nords naturally the nords rebelled and were ruthlessly crushed at first eventually parthenex and some of the other dragons decided to betray alduin and join the nords in overthrowing him it is said that kine mother of nords bequeathed the power of the thumb upon the nords with parthenex acting as a teacher for the early nord heroes they then used the voice to defeat the dragons and then used an elder scroll to cast alduin out of time for a while the dragon cults were eventually eradicated and the akoviri came and drove the dragons practically to extinction the first order of business is assigning who the deity actors are here there are three akatosh lorkhan and khan akatosh's stake here is pretty clear maintain the status quo by keeping men worshipping dragons and by extension him in doing this he's keeping a check on lorkhan and preventing him from creating change in the world i'm of the mind alduin is not akatosh even though a few questionable books in the game state otherwise in-game dialogue and events seem to heavily imply aldwin is just the supreme dragon lorkhan wants things to change and needs to disrupt the status quo here i believe he's the reason alduin forces like his duty to keep the peace by exploiting their natural will to dominate and also by extending alduin and offer so here's the problem lorcan isn't around anymore his body was apparently destroyed to create nirn and mortals and to cut the gods out of their power his will always works through some sort of intermediary some new form he might also be able to influence mortals in general just because mortals are considered partial descendants of him especially men so what was this form i have three suspects but more on that in just a bit we gotta talk about kind first kine also known as kynareth is the chief deity of the old nordic religion and said to be the widow of shore kynareth is credited with being the first aedra to join lorkhan and his plot to create nirn and mortal men likewise kind is credited as being the mother of all nords hence they are likely the same deity it makes sense why she'd have a vested interest in her children being conquered by alduin some sources credit kind alone for giving men the ability to use the thumb other sources are more ambiguous we have several sources telling us parthenex taught the first men how to shout so the notion kind did it all herself is kinda dubious most likely kind couldn't bestow the voice upon men alone because the gods aren't as powerful as they once were so she needed parthenax as an ally to do this the nature of this alliance has some implications some think akatosh intervened here to get a few of his dragons to turn on alduin the greybeard legend states kine approached parthenex who pitied men and swayed the dragon to our cause i think there's a clue for a third option here which is found in parthenox's name ambition overlord cruelty it's entirely possible parthenox was not a benevolent ally here but had dreams of usurping his older brother parthenex does tell us even that he wouldn't trust himself for another dovah but that's getting ahead of ourselves with all this talk of parthenex and alduin we got now identify the actors of this conflict only then can we start to piece together who is working for whom so we got three factions dragons dragon priests and the ancient nords some might argue dragons and dragon priests are one faction and the lord certainly tries to make it seem that way but i'll explain why their motives are probably not aligned making them distinct factions dragons created in akataxa's image mandated to maintain order over at least tamriel but most likely atmore and akavir as well pretty clear where as a whole their allegiance initially lies within that faction we really only have to concern ourselves with alduin and parthenex we know what these two did but not why they did it why did alduin unexpectedly turn on men and why did parthenax eventually turn on alduin to understand that we need to understand the nature of dragons a little bit despite what gameplay shows and what modern words believe dragons are not mindless beasts but highly intelligent creatures they are immortal and especially attuned to time as time is akatosh's domain and compelled to dominate they have a written form of language a culture and systems of government and religion though the dragon priests administered those aspects aldrin is also credited for creating their civilization we are told and see in cutscenes dragons like to talk and debate especially about high-level concepts like philosophy and morality honor and pride are also very important to them and they don't do well with imprisonment and isolation they can be bargained with pressed into service and made to follow leadership they are also untrusting and untrustworthy solitary and independent so even though they are immortal they are not unchanging they seem quite malleable in fact but their will to dominate seems to be an enduring feature of their very nature so it wouldn't be far-fetched to exploit and corrupt that aspect the notion that alduin betrayed akatasha's wishes in conquering the world could be true but it could also be revisionist history alduin is driven by his mission but he himself never gives us a justification for his actions in this theory alduin would have just been carrying out akatosh's wishes when he started destroying the world if we read into his name world eater and the potential for akatosh to actually be resentful towards mortals and men in particular due to their relation with lorkhan and chaos then it's possible alduin was just a giant reset button for akatosh if mortals became too unruhrly to control with his dragons aldmin could have been a mechanism to cleanse them from the world legends state that alduin would consume the world for it to begin anew and parthenex alludes to this when we first meet it's unclear if he ever did serve this purpose before thought but there's some myths about him doing things like killing all nords above the age of six years old at one point it's possible that his all-mortal interpretation and his translated name was said to be world eater after his conquest the evidence is there but requires a lot of conjectures to make the connections for the sake of coherence i'm going to continue the rest of this section assuming the abundance of sources telling us alduin betrayed akatosh are correct so what led alduin a strike i'm convinced it was lorkhan the question is how did he manage to corrupt alduin it's believed lorkhan is able to influence mortals through free will which is something endowed to them by lorkhan his wishes and desires are pretty much impossible to decipher so any action taken by immortal could be construed as his will but oftentimes the disruption of the status quo is taken to be his direct influence it's unlikely he can directly influence the actions and decisions of immortal dragons so an intermediary would be needed this is where we talk about dragon priests and the ancient nords the dragon priests were a select group of mortals trusted with running the government and religion that linked men with dragons and kept the peace the dragons and their priests were described as benevolent for a while but at some point during or shortly after men's arrival in tamriel the cult started to exert more control essentially enslaving the ancient nords they built massive complexes to honor the dragons in life and death which we now know as the boring draugr tombs in game the nature of these temples are not well known skoldoffen in particular is a very bizarre one why does this place have a portal to saving guard why are the priests granted eternal life as liches what is the connection between the priests and savangard clues to these questions may be present in the nature of the draugr drugger are the undead servants of the dragon priests through their worship of the priests they are able to transfer their life energy into the priests in order to sustain their immortality the draugr are just empty shells meant to harvest the life essence of mortals as they sleep they're pretty much a crop and a security force savangard as we understand it is the afterlife for honorable nords those who died valiantly in battle are sent there to live forever in a utopian realm of feast and song the realm is ruled by shore aka lorcan and access to the hall of valor is guarded by soon a friend of shore it's important to note the connections of immortality here the dragon priests achieved immortality through their sacrifice of once mortal servants savangard grants immortal life to the spirits of nords the dragon priests can open a portal to savangard which allows mortals and presumably alduin direct access to the realm there is some relationship here between all of these elements i believe the priests and the draggers are drawing power from savangard in order to sustain their immortality i also doubt the priests continue to worship or care about the dragons and are merely tools for lorkhan to set the trap that is savangard finally i think they are the thing that ultimately corrupted aldewin when lorkhan decided to cut a deal with alduin betray akatosh and you will be allowed to feast on the souls in savangard that aren't able to make it into the hall of valor but okay hold up i said we gotta discuss ancient nords so let's do that because lord khan might have not only been working through the dragon priests i think he was also working through the nords too simply put rebellion is one of the hallmarks of lor khan if you see a rebellion chances are he's got a hand in those affairs now the rebellion was almost certainly a just rebellion alduin makes no apologies for what he did and what he continues to do but if aldrin had been goaded into turning into a menace by lorkhan forcing the nords to rebel well things begin to look a bit more murky i have no definitive proof of any nords acting as the agent of lorkhan during the rebellion but i suspect if there was one acting at his behest it would have been felder the old the old nordic mage who used the elder scroll to cast alton ahead in time the reason i say this is because despite the wishes of his companions and the council of parthenox he brought the elder scroll to the final battle with aldwin anyways in using it he ensured aldwin was sent ahead in time and through the events of the main quest ended up in savangar the trap lorkhan had created for alduin we'll also see potential side effects of that elder scroll reading that also worked in lore khan's favor so what was the point of all this why did lord khan go through all this trouble to start a rebellion and send alduin ahead in time for starters he wanted to break akatasha's grip over nirn and mortals in doing this he made nords so hateful of dragons that they were vilified and removed from the nordic pantheon many years later missionaries from the eight divine would find it difficult to convince the nords to accept akatosh as a good god the ancient nords didn't know about akatosh so eventually they were able to be taught that akatosh was different from alduin and they were also different from the ancient dragons between that time though nords heavily worshipped their remaining gods like kine shore and many nordic heroes this led to many wars and the creation of the first nordic empire which heavily disrupted the old elven akatosh order on tamriel to say lorkhan benefited from the disappearance of the dragons would be a major understatement this was pretty much his era but i think he had another motive focused on alduin himself i believe lorkhan wanted alduin to be sent ahead in time because this pretty much guaranteed a future conflict that could disrupt things more and because he either simply wanted to destroy alduin in a way that would ensure he never returned or in a way that lorkhan could claim alduin's soul for himself it all depends on the true nature of savangard i am convinced savangard is nothing more than a trap for alduin as i've said a million times at this point it also seems to be a waiting room of sorts for lorkhan's most useful mortal allies but let's focus on the trap part odaving describes alduins's ability to enter savangard as a privilege which he guards jealously if it's a privilege that implies it was granted to him and the only one capable of granting him passage into a realm is the lord of that realm sure aka lorkhan as well when we get to saving guard we learn that the warriors in the hall of valor were ordered by short not to kill alduin as he consumed the souls of the dead nords he wanted alduin to rely on his realm to rest and recover a place where he can let his guard down when he was most vulnerable let's go back to talking about the nature of sauvengard i believe it to be a realm where mortality is inverted mortals are made immortal and immortals are made mortal it's possible this is knowledge appropriated by lord khan and mortals by the dragon priests or it's just the nature of the realm as it's located in the aetherius but why a god who created mortality to begin with would have a realm granting immortality to those he deems worthy has some interesting implications but i'm not going to get into that here okay so we have most of lorcan's plan mapped out corrupt alduin get the nords to rebel ensure alduin gets sent forward in time trap aldun and savangard and have him slain there we're just missing three steps step one ensure the nords succeed in their rebellion to do this they're going to need some help kind of course steps in to save her children and possibly because lorkhan and her were lovers but the children part is good enough on its own she can't do it alone so she's going to need dragons to help this is where our boy parthenex comes in as you can tell from the earlier part when i put him on trial for war crimes i do not think this dragon's talents are as clean as everyone wants to believe it's quite possible he betrayed alduin not out of pity for men but because he believed he could rule dragons and men better than alduin could as his name implies ambition is either a character trait of his or an attribute the ancient nords attached to his name either way i think it signals something important as well parthenox admits the ancient nords didn't trust him and kept him unaware of their plans finally on the day of alduin's defeat he was far away from the site of battle once again indicating he was not kept informed of what was going on sure it's possible he wasn't trusted just because it was a dragon and a turn code at that but it's also possible that nord suspected parthenex had some ulterior motives it's clear he didn't hate his fellow dragons he admits after we slight alderman for good that he mourns the death of his brother that could mean all sorts of things for dragon bro but it definitely casts some doubt towards his initial sincerity for the alliance with men so it's possible lorkhan struck a bargain with parthenex perhaps he offered him a chance to usurp his older brother and save the dragons from themselves and maybe go back to surfing akatosh's wishes who really can say exactly why parthenox would want to do this but there's plenty of motives to choose from if we want to keep him clean of ambition we can believe that lorkhan trusted kind could sway the dragon or figure that by this point akatosh would step in and order parthenox and some of his dragons to aid the nords as one of the legends goes lorkhan would still get the alliance the nords needed to succeed in any case okay we're pretty much done talking about the past and the dragon wars it's time to talk the events of the game so alduin pops back into time and starts [ __ ] [ __ ] up as lorkhan probably planned the civil war ensured alduin would have plenty of souls in savangard so naturally he made sure that continued by saving ulfric and by extension the player now it's time to talk about the last two missing steps of lorkhan's plan find a dragonborn and get them into sovengaard to slay alduin this is no doubt the hardest part of the plan because dragonborn are meant to be the creation of akatosh he needs one of those though because as we know only a dragonborn and savangard can slay aldwin remember the prophecy of the dragonborn in it the prophecy foretold the conditions needed for the last dragonborn to come into the world and slay alduin the prophecy is a cute device that neatly incorporates the events of all the games arena and indicates with the civil war skyrim the conditions have been met ushering in alduin and the last dragonborn all of it turned out to be true but who wrote the prophecy we know the akavir made the wall but most likely the prophecy came from an elder scroll all i'm going to say about the elder scrolls is that they are giant plot devices meant to explain events with a giant question mark we also get a time wound which is similar to a dragon break another writing device bethesda likes to use remember how i said i believe lorkhan had a hand in that elder scroll being read on that mountain here's another reason why i believe the prophecy was written into the elder scroll at the moment of alduin's banishment lorkhan used that moment to pencil in all the conditions needed to spawn a dragonborn into existence and maybe just maybe with his soul fused to it that's right the player might be lorkhan for those of you who are aware of the shahzar and the theory that every player character in every game is actually lorkhan probably have already come to this conclusion a long time ago i'm not keen on the idea of indiscriminately saying we're always lorkhan but the shoe does fit in those cases because it's an intentionally ambiguous shoe size here's the other shoe everything we've been told throughout skyrim that the player is a fragment of akatosh's soul is true the player is dragonborn and we know what that means but we also know the player is meant to be the last dragonborn so that could also mean a lot of things likewise the fact that the prophecy was penned by the akavir the fabled dragonslayers who by that reputation were probably no friends of akatosh at that time add more evidence to the last dragonborn being something different it's also possible both gods have lease on the player's soul so the last dragonborn is a powerful god hybrid ultimately it's left ambiguous so the player can decide who they represent so it comes down to this is the player going to slay alduin in the name of akatosh or the name of lorkhan if it's the former then most likely slaying alduin and savangard does something that sends his soul back to daddy akatosh where maybe he can be reincarnated or just taken out of existence so he will no longer harm the world akatosh has a large stake in now if it's the latter then perhaps alderman's soul goes to lorkhan who wants to use it for who knows what the end game is unknown to us here but i'm pretty sure this is some seriously high stakes end game for both of these gods if we're working for lor khan he gets his hands on a dragonborn he's able to ship off to savangard to slay alduin forever some evidence for the player being lorkhan is that shaw is not in his throne at the time of the players arrival and the three ancient nord heroes agreed to go with the dragonborn to slay alduin even though they were told not to do that by shore there's plenty of evidence to suggest the player is not actually sure himself but once again it's all very mixed and comes down to player preference if they want to believe that they are the literal embodiment of these gods walking tamriel there's stuff here to support that headcanon and that's pretty much it that's my crackpipe theory on what the true story of skyrim actually is i actually like it bear in mind this is not something i came up with while playing the game it was only after i finished and started writing this theory down as i feverishly read through the uesp and looked back at my footage that all the pieces started to come together is it airtight no but i think the ambiguity that exists in it is mostly intentional gaps meant for the player to insert their own ideas in order to claim some ownership of the story and the events of the game it's a clever way to write a story that basically has no agency for the player but still offer the really attentive players something to latch on to do i think it's an effective story no not really the fact that i've watched dozens of skyrim videos over the past few months and only ever seen people berate skyrim's main plot as being cliche bland and just non-existent really speaks volumes to how subtle the story truly is if players have to sink probably about 10 plus hours just learning enough lore to start to understand the real story going on here that's kind of a problem it would be fine if there was another equally as enjoyable story for less informed players to latch on to but without this context the main story of skyrim is painfully barren bottom line that's just poor storytelling it's presented poorly gameplay mechanics do almost nothing to support notions like dragons being intelligent and the game itself just lulls players into taking everything at face value and not reading into things because the expectation is that the game is as shallow as everyone post 2015 started accusing it as but we aren't done just yet we still gotta answer who seren is working for here and decide the fate of one more dragon esserian's a smart lad and he's read his books and he's figured out what's really going on the way he sees it he's got a choice embrace the akatosh in him the patron deity of his elven ancestors and banish alduin to free the world of his corruption or listen to his mortal patron lorkhan and use his power as dragonborn and his twin divine essence to achieve unimaginable power power to make him more than a sad little mage who must suffer with low magicka and weak spells power to raise an army rebuild the blades and take what he wants he judged parthenox guilty of his past crimes but delayed his punishment unsure if the dragon had really done enough to atone for his crimes yet upon reflection though he figured parthenox had done enough he did not doubt the old dragon sincerity it was clear he'd truly embraced the way of the voice and had found some peace for the things he'd done forced to have witnessed the sad fate his fellow dovah had to endure alone on that mountain for thousands of years he had truly reformed he managed to do what his stronger brother could not overcome his natural desire to conquer and rule he set aside his ambition his overlordship and his cruelty devoted now to the teaching of the way a lifestyle that urged one to look within themselves and find balance between action and need serion would not slay the dragon at the behest of the bleeds in fact he was through being ordered around by the blades dummy mommy delphine's hold on him was finally broken with that said before he departed for skaldoffen sarian had to finally choose what did he stand for standing there in his definitely not frost crack spire 2.0 wizard based meyer watch he knew deep down inside he knew what his path was it might not be the moral path it might not be the just path but it was his path and his destiny and one does not flinch in the face of destiny they seize it in his mind the words of a wise man wrong true one phrase rang true to change the fate of the world forever give him nothing but take from him everything [Music] with parthenex out of the picture sarian took his place as king of the dragons odaving pledged his unending fealty to the last dragonborn sarian strolled off that mountain the king of an immortal race of flying war machines head of the blades a hero to which every man woman and child in tamriel owed their lives to two parts divinity incarnate and most importantly a mage on a mission he knew where he needed to go to next and wasted no time setting course for winterhold alright i guess we should probably look at how we can actually improve the main quest rather than just you know leaving it the way we'd found it first and foremost i think making the player the last dragonborn of ancient prophecy was a major mistake now i'm not a big fan of chosen one prophecy plots to begin with but especially so in a game like the elder scrolls where being told you're unequivocally this foretold hero spits in the eyes of the core appeal of these games like good luck role-playing as an average person unless you met a game and actively avoid the main quest after being given the task to retrieve the dragonstone from bleakfall's barrow even with uriel going on about his wet dreams about us in oblivion it's left pretty ambiguous what that actually means and it doesn't really come up again later on who were we chosen by according to uriel just some vague body known as the gods what is our destiny to close shut the jaws of oblivion well in both cases we can make the argument martin was the real chosen one of that story and our destiny if we had one to begin with was to help martin achieve his my point being it's nowhere near as obvious as what we get in skyrim and that wouldn't be as bad if we were actually allowed to grow into the role of dragonborn but it's assigned to us in the earliest hours of the game at the watchtower even after being told we are dragonborn by some random nameless guard we don't get much of an opportunity to ponder what any of this means and what our purpose in this story is once we make it to high rothgar irongear tells us pretty much everything we needed to know from that point on the mystery of who we are is completely solved and the story shifts to uncovering the mystery that is the return of the dragons okay so let's fix this introduction first we aren't going to fundamentally change the story here so this is going to remain a prophecy chosen one story we're just adding some more context and opportunity for deeper role plays i already detailed most of the rewriting i would do for this setup alduin doesn't attack helgen one of his lieutenants does that instead we have the opportunity to chase it to riverwood where we can mount a defense with the villagers some guards and whoever we left helgen with or we can run away from riverwood and let it fend for itself maybe this would kill a few less important npcs as a result if we kill the dragon there we absorb the soul and that tells us something is different about our character and then everyone goes oh wow that's weird you should go see the court wizard they will know what that weird magic is if we don't kill the dragon at riverwood it won't break anything because random dragon attacks are already turned on due to the events at helgen and we are pretty much guaranteed to run into one out in the world somewhere i know that a subset of players like being able to perpetually keep dragons turned off by just not doing the defense of the watchtower but remember this is the dragon game them not being around after alduin made his big show at haugen really doesn't make much sense and it arbitrarily roadblocks access to shouts so let's just assume shouts and dragon fights are actually worth the nuisance and have them on from the start the sequence then plays out the same we encounter one in the wild kill it absorb its soul and this time we just get a prompt from our character that's like oh well that's weird maybe i should ask around about this and then again we need to seek out a court wizard here we replace the stone of bleak false barrows with just learning a shout because that's the whole reason we had to go to bleak falls barrow anyway the stone was just some mcguffin needed to contrive us going out there the court wizard suspects we are dragonborn but needs us to learn an actual shout to prove their theory they'll direct us to the nearest word wall dungeon to learn a shout alternatively if we already learned to shout from exploration we can demonstrate one right there and then and then the court wizard will go yeah i think you're a dragonborn this is well beyond my pay grade you should go see the grey birds we then get the trip to iverson in up to 7000 steps get to high rothgar and initially get denied an audience with the greybeards we got to demonstrate a shout at their front door for them to even let us inside the building we tell r gear we are dragonborn and he doubts us he tells us if we can retrieve the horn of jurgen windcaller that will be enough to prove it because the place is designed to test people's gift of the voice basically this is our gear telling us we need to level up our shout game if we want to impress them alternatively if we can demonstrate three different shouts or a fully leveled shout then they will be impressed because even a nord child can do a level 1 foo shout or something making this change gives us a few things first this helps demystify the voice and demonstrate that it's something not as unique as it's for whatever reason depicted in skyrim because even according to established lore in the game the voice is meant to be something all nords are gifted with yeah it might be a little weird seeing an elf naturally gifted with it but the greybeards might just be able to chalk it up as us having a nord in our bloodline or something second it gives us another natural off ramp for the story with the greybeards pulling aekias kassadis basically telling us to go out into the world and do some exploration and leveling before we get the goods in our officially named dragonborn this at least makes it so that we have to earn the right to call ourselves that third it lets us shirk the dragonborn prophecy a while longer maybe we can hear about the prophecy a bit and are left wondering if it applies to us or not but it gives us ample time to continue to roleplay as someone who might just be talented at slang dragons after all a skilled warrior can still kill dragons it's only a dragonborn that can devour their souls and kill them permanently anyways let's redesign oostengrov to actually test shouts and make it so that we learn all the different parts of unrelenting force and whirlwind sprint in that dungeon also builds a lot of diegetic sources of information on the dragonborn the nordic tongues and all the info r gear can dump on us so when we return and they officially recognize us as dragonborn we already know a good amount of what's going on through our own investigation r gear can just exposition dump the players who weren't paying attention at ustengrov also the horn was actually in the crypt and like i suggested earlier it turns out to be a neat trinket that the greybeards are able to activate for us allowing it to amp up our shouts the greybeards are able to periodically upgrade the horn for us and are able to direct us to radiant word walls meanwhile between being told to get to ustengrav and returning with the horn we get intercepted by a courier with that letter from delphine she's interested in us because she heard we've been able to slay a few dragons she's already got the dragonstone because she's a good capable character and wants our help slaying the one she predicts is about to be brought back to life at kinds grove that's when we see alduin for the first time and alduin can drop some more hints about us being dragonborn his motives and maybe the direction of his story and when delphine sees us devour the dragon's soul there she instantly recognizes us as dragonborn this immediately signals to us that delphine and the blades are a different faction from our gear and the greybeards and one that is much more eager for us to develop our powers and is quicker overall at getting on the ball here the story can pretty much progress the same from here maybe we can add an alternate route if we don't want to force the player to use the blades but i don't really want to be adding quests here just altering and recontextualizing what we already have personally i think the story works well enough and the blades detour all to stay the key is that we need to distinguish the differences between the blades and the beards much more and much earlier because we are going to have to choose who we end up siding with honestly i'd keep most of the story the same up until capturing otiving with the changes we already made to the beginning a lot of the urgency and agency issues have already been addressed and we earned the right to be recognized as dragonborn and the hero of the story so let's skip ahead to when we get to otiving the blades want parth dead the beards tell us to just leave part b and that's all fine it works well enough otiving i'd set up to be a third faction of sorts i turn him into something like yesmin from fallout new vegas someone we can side with just so we have our own independent outcome i've already demonstrated what that actually looks like with sirian's ending the piece is already there we just need a couple of conversations with otiving to make it official we set him up as our second in command type thing and he gives us access to a bunch of different dragons we can summon in combat and maybe some unique dragon trinkets that can beef up the player in unique ways if we side with the greybeards and leave parth alone he becomes king of the dragons and levels up our horn to its max which makes us godly at shouting if we side with the blades we end up having to slay odafing as well because if they didn't tolerate parth they're definitely not going to be fans of an independent dragon like him and this gives us access to serious dragon slaying hardware and a deep pool of blade followers that go beyond the three we recruited ourselves as well the companions we donated to the cause are substantially more powerful now thanks to their blades training and get even better buffs for slaying dragons and that's how we transform this power fantasy chosen one story devoid of any player agency into a power fantasy chosen one story that at least has some player agency choices have consequences and there's rewards and drawbacks for whomever we end up sliding with the gameplay considerations boil down to whether we want more shout power more dragon slang power and beefy followers or a dragon goon squad we can call in on demand it lets us better defy who our dragonborn is what they are about and what they are fighting for i'd also give alduin so much more love and make him into a compelling antagonist and maybe throw him hint at the greater conflict between akatosh and lorkhan here ultimately though i think they just focused on their own conflict they shortchanged the civil war a lot presumably to shift resources to get the dragonborn line complete which seems to be the only line not to have suffered any significant content cuts every other major faction and quest line appears to have had some amount of slimming down some much more than others but if the main story had anything reduced or cut i can't tell from playing the game and that alone speaks to the attention and polish the main quest received above all other major quest lines especially the civil war the thing is the civil war had much more potential to tell a much broader and frankly a more interesting story maybe it's because the thing is so incomplete that the inadequacies of bethesda's storytelling hasn't crept in enough to tarnish the potential it had but i think that questline had the potential to tell a story more appropriate for an elder scrolls game if i had been in those early concept meetings i'd have been advocating for the civil war to receive top billing and the dragon conflict being relegated to a background thing that more or less only existed to serve as shouts if one had to be sacrificed so the other may be completed there's so much more in the world of skyrim that ties into the civil war as opposed to the dragons the greybeards and the blades who will pretty much vanish entirely from these videos from here on out because they are so compartmentalized and inconsequential to the rest of the game but just look at how many times i had to mention the civil war in this section alone even though i was actively trying to avoid talking about it and spoiler alert that isn't really going to change because the political conflicts of skyrim play a much bigger role in this game than the dragons ever did in conclusion this should have been the civil war game not the dragon game sirian was thinking bigger picture slaying elderly was a good first step but he was going to need to do more if he was going to be the next great hero he could hold his own but his magic game was still pretty weak he knew what peak performance looked like in a mage and that's what he was aiming for to get there he needed the mages college of winterhold but before getting into that let's talk about why being a mage in skyrim is such a [ __ ] miserable experience i understand why hardly any skyrim analyses don't even discuss magic let alone focus on a pure mage character in order to discuss what plagues skyrim mage players you really have to talk about skyrim's systems in its entirety down to its ui a pure mage player needs to acquaint themselves with every aspect of skyrim's systems just to have a chance at having fun pure mage players are forced to follow a very narrow path of progression for almost the entire game just so that their character remains viable they don't need to quite bust out the spreadsheets to get a fun experience but they do have to play very optimally which leads to an unsatisfying experience one that robs the player a future replayability because each character needs to follow very similar paths just to keep pace with the natural progression of the game's level scaling for example considering destruction magic is going to be the primary mode of damage dealing for a pure mage the fact that the player only has four options for scaling their damage is a major problem when it comes to dealing with scaling a character with the world of skyrim two options are naturally open to the player character progression and altering the world in other words make the character stronger or make the world weaker let's start with that second round first because it's a much simpler route and we've already talked a bit about it basically as the player gains character levels the world of skyrim gets progressively more challenging as high level enemies spawn this isn't an equal system across the board with different areas of the map and different enemy factions scaling differently but it's definitely there and definitely noticeable it's not nearly as traumatizing as the level scaling oblivion used but we'll get to dissecting the level scaling system when we talk dungeons there's mainly two ways the world of skyrim can get easier grab some follower on pcs or tweak the difficulty setting of skyrim the former is relatively self-explanatory but as i discussed in the followers section earlier there's definitely some pitfalls unwitting players can end up falling into that would leave them saddled with a follower that is more of a liability than an asset especially for magic characters i already gave a good indication of the best way to filter followers as a magic player find an npc with skills that boost their survivability and that will let you maximize their equipment buffs when you get to enchanting their gear the difficulty slider or setting now since they reduce the granularity of the option in skyrim is something that a magic player really ought to familiarize themselves with if dark souls drink is a game that doesn't need a difficulty setting then skyrim is the complete opposite end of that spectrum where fiddling with the setting is a consequential part of the overall experience this should not be a static thing for the skyrim player especially a pure magic character i'm sure there are some mass assists out there who will crank this [ __ ] up to legendary the moment they land in the game and leave it there but i'm here to tell you to not let those players bully you into thinking you aren't a true gamer if you aren't doing that for starters legendary difficulty is more or less a meme setting bethesda through and after the fact because people really wanted a bigger challenge for their cruise control stealth archer builds i don't think it's something most players should even consider putting their game to let alone pure mages a mage player really shouldn't push past master if they want an experience that won't just evolve into a painful spell spamming chore i mean the experience already does this so going the extra mile and doing more of that isn't really proving anything except an abundance of free time unless you're doing some crazy exploit run but i'm discussing the normal skyrim experience most players should expect with this game stacking necromancer summons with the ethereal crown is beyond the scope of this discussion i like to start an adapt and slowly push up to master i spent about half my time on adapt 45 on expert and about five percent on master had i not needed to end the playthrough early to get started on this video i'd have spent more time on master also i could have pushed onto expert a lot sooner but footage is expensive and i'm already at 700 gigabytes as of writing this inflating that to over a terabyte with lots of death reloads isn't really going to make for a better video my final verdict then would be for a first time magic player to start at adapt at most probably even down at apprentice and then bump up the difficulty a notch when things start to get easy experienced players start at adapt and the same procedure applies if bethesda hadn't intended for players to mess with these settings mid playthrough they would have locked them out and not put them a couple of menus away at any given time if you aren't having fun hit the setting first and move it up or down to your tastes unironically it is how todd intended now that we've talked about making the world easier let's talk about making the player character better for this two options present themselves spew more pew or spew stronger pew boost your magicka pool or boost the strength of your spells in reality a mage player will be pursuing both as they are certainly not mutually exclusive in fact we will see that they barely have any overlap at all meaning you should be working on both but we'll also see how boosting magic is often the only route available even when the more power option is on the table q dual casting so how do we build a deeper pool character leveling picking the blessed race during character creation certain standing stones potions equipment enchantments and blessings character leveling is primarily how mage players will be getting themselves more matcha each time the player earns a character level up they are given a perk point and an option to increase either health stamina or magicka by 10 points by the time i'd reached the end of my playthrough only 16 of my 57 level ups were invested into something other than matrika and those other investments were near the end when i'd gotten a bunch of gear that made a lot of my spells almost free to cast this is the glass cannon approach and as far as i'm concerned the only fun way to play a pure mage the lack of health will make you vulnerable to getting one shot by certain enemies especially enemy archers so be prepared for that although i didn't run into that issue too much when i had a small army to keep aggro off of me race choice is pretty important for a mage more important than any other play style i'd argue but that plus 50 magicka high elves get is very noticeable in the early game how even later in the game as the best circlets can only give about plus 70 magicka heights also get a racial ability to regen magika 25 times faster for a minute once per day which is one of the few racial abilities that remain useful throughout the game britons aren't a bad second choice for a mage but the spell resistance and spell absorption abilities are mostly useful for dragon fights mage enemies are definitely on the rarer side in skyrim considering altmer aren't naturally weak to match against skyrim like they were in other test games i feel like they are just better offensive and defensive mages but buttons aren't a bad second option just be prepared for a little more waiting for magicka to regen during the early game next up we got standing stones and the only two that are going to affect the magicka pool are the atronach and the apprentice atronach isn't what it used to be it's actually gotten a buff this time around the player can now still regenerate magicka with it it's just 50 slower meanwhile the player will receive a plus 50 magicka bump and a permanent 50 spell absorption which can be very powerful so what 50 means is that it has a 50 chance to proc if it doesn't the player just takes the full damage of the spell if it does proc then the player absorbs the full effect of the spell negating all damage and transferring the base cost of the spell into the player's magicka pool spell absorb is also calculated before any other effects like say elemental resistance so even if the spell fails to absorb the spell still has to get through the players resistances where this gets nutty is that spell absorption works on just about any effect that isn't normal weapon damage falling damage or drowning damage so that means spells shouts weapon enchantments diseases poisons buffs debuffs it will block 100 of the damage taken from all of those if the effect has no associated magicka costs then it won't transfer any magicka but it will still nullify the damage think nullifying poisons but what's even nuttier is that this works on spells casted by the player on themselves like creature summons this can lead to some fun times where you can stand there spamming summons and absorbing the magicka from the summons and because it works off of the base cast cost you can net a magicka profit and refill your magica doing this so say you're summoning a dramora lore that has a base cost of 358 if you have 60 reduction on conjuration spells that someone is only going to cost you 143 magika but if you absorb the summon you get the full 358 back even though you only spent 143. with 50 of this procking life can be pretty good so long as you aren't depending on that someone getting out there asap if you're actively watching right now you'll see me trying to get the atronach stone to eat my summons but it's not working because of the unofficial patch this won't be the last time we see the unofficial patch deciding to ruin a fun exploit they thought was a bug oh and spell absorption can stack so if you're bretton with the atronach stone and you pop your racial well you just got yourself 100 spell absorbed for a minute the apprentice stone's abilities are not nearly as wonderful in comparison because of how the regenerate effect works with it that 100 regen bonus is only active outside of combat how are you even supposed to know that i guess you aren't welcome to being a mh it only gets more confusing from here so how does magicka regen even work sorry you asked firstly magical regen rates differ if the player is in combat or out of combat the base rates are three percent of your total magicka per second out of combat and one percent while in combat so outside of combat it takes 30 seconds to regen on your magicka and inside it takes 100 seconds secondly we have magical regen effects that will speed those up but those two will only take effect inside or outside of combat which it is is dependent entirely upon where the effect is coming from i.e racial abilities standing stone powers potions equipment shrine blessings etc just about nothing in game will tell you whether the effect will be active inside or outside of combat you just kind of have to know that off the top of your head this is why i like the high off ability because it's active whether you're in combat or not to make things even more complicated these effects can stack or they will overwrite each other once again nothing will tell you which will happen if the effects are on different pieces of equipment they will stack with one another but no amount of potions of different origins and degrees of effects you consume will get the effects to stack it'll just apply the highest effect different blessings and buffs can stack with one another and with equipment enchantments and potions consumed this definitely presents an opportunity for some fantastic cheese but it's hell trying to figure out if what you're using is going to work the way you're hoping for it to work and this isn't a problem exclusive to magical regen it can manifest for many other effects too drain effects damage effects office skills you get the picture so how can you tell if something is even working your best bet is to check the active effects page of your spellbook magic and stealth players can get through a whole playthrough without ever looking at this page but for a mage this is one of the only reliable sources of information on what things are actually doing for them but even this page can be obnoxiously deceiving just look at how these blessings are presented blessings are neat little bonuses the player can come across out in the world they can be obtained from things like shrines for the divines giving a beggar some money visiting all the tablets on the way up to 7000 steps and many other sources if you check them out in your active effects book they might seem kinda nice until you look at their duration and see something like active for eight hours from the blessing of giuliano's you might think this equates to eight in-game hours which is 20 real life minutes but you'd be wrong okay then obviously it's the opposite and it's eight real life hours you'd be wrong no it's actually eight real life hours measured with in-game hours duh so the game doesn't actually look at the clock on your pc or console to tell when eight real life hours have passed it will measure the passage of time based on how many in-game minutes have passed alright so the skyrim clock is based on the unit of one in-game day equaling one real life hour hence why the eight-hour blessing of giuliano's is in fact eight in-game days which is pretty decent but in a game where time skips forward if we fast travel or we skip time ourselves by sleeping or hitting the weight key things get thrown out of whack pretty quickly what seemed like something based neatly on real life time quickly proves to not be and forces the player to start doing conversions in their head to figure out how much time they really have left for this thing really what would have been better is if the game just based it all on in-game time and just said eight days but there are also blessings that will measure time based on in-game days specifically the dragon slaying buff this just says 5 days and so the player might think based on the shrine bus that this means this will actually be 5 real life days which we now know would be 120 in-game days you'll be wrong it's just five in-game days so five real life hours if you don't wait fast travel etc okay but surely this can't get any more complicated well if we look at the well-rested bonus we get from sleeping in a bed we own it says it lasts seven hours this is just seven in-game hours so 17 and a half minutes why because [ __ ] you that's why i wish i could tell you a neat little trick like if it says the time in the description it's in-game hours and if it's an actual timer beneath the effect it's real lifetime but even that's not accurate there's very little rhyme or reason you just gotta know this [ __ ] and keep checking your spell effects to see if it's still there my guess is most of these quirks are the result of having different designers who all had different ideas for things like how to measure time in game and how effects should be stacking with no standardized rules for people to reference so they all just implemented the little bonuses their quests give based on their own logic and called it a day but we are way off topic really i just wanted to explain why mages cannot actually rely on what the game is telling them the lack of information from the ui is probably the biggest issue magic players are going to face because it means any decisions they need to make can really only be based off of what they remember and experimentation in a game where the margin of error is already pretty damn narrow for magic players because one bad perk investment can result in bad times this is a serious problem speaking of perks let's start to transition away from discussing how you can increase your magicka into how you can increase your spell effectiveness when it comes to making spells more effective the player only has four options investing perks into the related skill tree dual casting potions that fortify the magic skill and buying higher leveled spells i'll be going into each individual skill in the next section for the moment let's just talk perks in general in the perk department mages once again have it harder than melee and stealth characters this mostly comes down to the fact that mages often need to invest in more skilled trees because different trees will often have perks that are kinda universally useful for all mage builds for example the recovery perk in the restoration tree this perk lets the player recover magicka 25 and 50 faster and as we just finished discussing this is useful for just about every mage this unfortunately will necessitate the player invests three level ups just to get the most out of the perk i went ahead and came up with a few builds just to compare the perk costs and complexity we'll start with what i'd consider the absolute bare minimum for the builds to be viable with the mage we see it needs 24 perk points where as the two-handed warrior needs 34 but really that mage is going to have a rough time without conservation and alchemy throwing those in we get up to 35 so one point above the warrior bringing them in line with each other but when we start to throw in some extra perks and skills to create what i'd consider a comfortable experience you can start to see just how rough it can get from aegis 58 for the mage as opposed to 44 for the warrior the thing to remember too is that this is just perk points complexity is created in the build when you consider things like prerequisites skill level and perk requirements the warrior is one less perk tree and the archery tree is just points into bow damage whenever they feel like it but if you want to get the most out of conjuration twin souls is highly recommended so you're talking getting it to 100 and dumping five perk points along the way i didn't put illusion into the build because it just seems redundant having illusion and destruction odds are you're going to favor one over the other but illusion is a great example of a school that needs a lot of perks just to become viable because level scaling will make illusion spells do nothing on enemies some enemy types like undead need a perk just so that illusion spells will work on them no other offensive skill in skyrim suffers from this issue a lack of investment in one handed might result in really bad damage but it will never result in no damage as a mage i never found myself comfortable with how many perk points i had i was always starved for them usually screwing myself out of three other options whenever i spend a point at level up playing a melee character i'd routinely find myself just not spending perk points because i had nothing i felt i needed to invest in i've seen a lot of analysis videos where people just assumed having an excess of perk points was a universal problem for all builds the truth is they just never tried playing a magic heavy character but let's get back to talking about how we can scale our spell effectiveness using destruction as an example how do we get more damage out of our spells we can and should invest in two perks that boost the respective elements which is something we ought to do for all three elements because of the different enemy weaknesses and resistances but the main way we are supposed to be scaling damage is with higher level spells this is another difference between magic and melee stealth there are no level requirements for weapons if i find a daedric sword at level 10 i'm free to equip it and start using it if i find a tome for an expert level fire spell at level 10 i can learn the spell but i won't have the magicka to cast it i need to get proficient in destruction and eventually unlock the perk to discount expert destruction spells and like how no sword has a level requirement they also don't have a stamina requirement meanwhile a mage also needs to buff up their total magicka pool thing is there's an upper limit to the usefulness of higher leveled spells and that ceiling is a lot lower than you might think this resulted in me sticking with spewing apprentice and adapt's level destruction spells the entire game and that's because the magic of the damage cost just wasn't good enough for higher level spells i'd end up doing more damage with a weaker spell because it was more magical efficient back in older test games we had spellcrafting to work this problem out but skyrim did away with that system entirely making it so that while melee and stealth characters are free to modify their weapons mages are not some of you may be wondering what about dual casting dual casting is something mages have that others don't yeah melee has dual wielding but that does require them giving up block entirely while dual casting doesn't require giving up anything but here's the thing dual casting is a trap because of how it affects magicka use and spell output oftentimes its output is worse than if the spell was just single casted going back to destruction dual casting firebolt is objectively worse because it will consume 40 more magica but only increased damage output 10 percent that's a 30 premium to temporarily increase your dps the consideration changes if you have impact which lets you stun most enemies if you hit them with certain dual casted destruction spells and that fundamentally changes how the game is played as a mage but dual casting restoration spells is actually terrible and should never be done because once again 30 premium just to get a 10 increase in healing speed only this time there's no secondary effect from dual casting dual casting illusion spells on the other hand is fantastic because it will increase the effective level this spell will have letting you successfully influence higher level foes i also appreciate dual casting and conjuration alteration spells because most spells have really low duration in those skills and having to resummon a minion every 30 seconds gets tedious dual casting will double the duration of the spells it won't make them stronger but not having to cycle spells as much is kinda nice ultimately though dual casting falls way short of its potential the fact that we can't mix spells with different effects like a fire and water spell to make steam for instance seems like a missed opportunity it's a shame because it's obvious bethesda wanted to turn magic into a more visceral action-oriented system and dual casting was the perfect chance for that they could have taken the idea to its logical conclusion and made a magic system like the absolutely named magicka games or even something like tyranny both games had players mixing different basic elements of its magic system to create unique and powerful effects usually through experimentation i also don't see why impact should have been a thing exclusive to destruction i could imagine impact fitting all magic schools in some form or another maybe casting restoration spells could have an area of effect around the player that slows or stuns enemies or hitting enemies with illusion spells could also stun them or have another kind of appropriate effect why make it a perk make it a fundamental part of how magic works and the impact effects of each spell increases as these spells level up and the player's level and magic schools level up maybe if the player hits zero magicka the spells just lose most of their effectiveness in all of their impact but can still do some trickling effects real quickly i want to mention alchemy effects you can chug potions that will boost the effectiveness of spells in a school so destruction spells will actually do more damage and healing spells will actually heal more these are great effects that i wish could be applied to equipment when enchanting i have no idea why i can't enchant my ropes to make my destruction spells do more damage because having to choose between reducing their costs and buffing their damage would give me a lot more to consider as opposed to what i do now which is stack cost reduction until spells are pretty much free but with a high level in alchemy and the appropriate perks invested the player can make some pretty bopping skill potions even without exploiting the alchemy enchanting stacking exploit that the unofficial patch unfortunately removed just another reason why i believe alchemy to be an essential skill for most magic players and question its placement in the stealth section of the skill canopy as a result i'm going to be covering alchemy in the next skill section i'll admit i did a lot of bellyaching in this section and it might appear like i've got some bone to pick with melee and stealth characters in skyrim but i really don't coming from oblivion i'd say those two playstyles got much-needed love and attention in skyrim they can actually be fun play styles now thanks to things like perks and the smithing skill what i resent is that magic got gutted and it appears to be intentional magic and alchemy was crazy powerful and morrowind so bethesda tried to reign things in with oblivion thing was that oblivion introduced enough new elements for magic that it allowed for new exploits and made the playstyle still very powerful in comparison to the other two so skyrim came to finish what oblivion started there was no need for this so long as each playstyle has an enjoyable progression what difference does it make if one is more powerful than the others the simple act of removing spellcrafting has had a profoundly negative impact on the magic experience then there's a slimming down of all the magic schools killing mysticism in the process limiting the power of enchanting in alchemy and just the layout of the schools as trees in general that all contribute to the sapping of the fun of the playstyle being a mage ends up turning into a chore of balancing and optimizing a bunch of minut attributes like magicka cost and regen without any of the reward that was always associated with playing as a mage a select few restrictions on mages have been lifted like armor affecting spell effectiveness but all that's encouraging is specking into one of the more enjoyable play styles as i've already talked about a confident mage only needs to be investing in six trees do we really need to get into a seventh with all that said i still managed to have some fun as a mage in spite of all the limitations the first 10 to 15 levels were pretty miserable but once i was able to ditch all my novice spells there's a relaxing rhythm the magic playstyle can fall into it doesn't last forever as global level scaling eventually outpaces the damage of the best destruction spells and then the players just forced into an unwinnable arms race with the game but i think that's enough speaking in general about magic let's finally get into the skills themselves so what better place to start than with destruction i've already detailed most of the issues that hamper it dual casting is a trap unless the player has impact higher level spells are trapped because they are inefficient will do less total dps we don't have spell making to balance things out we need perks and higher level spells to scale damage but let's just take things from the top first let's just look at the tree and the layout of its perks destruction has 14 individual perks requiring a total of 17 points to fill completely it is only exceeded by conjuration in the number of unique perks it has one-handed and two-handed require more points to complete but these are all deceptive points of comparison destruction is by far the most expensive skill to rely on as a mage player the reason being none of the skills mentioned and necessitate or even warrant filling out completely destruction with maybe the exception of the three ultimate elemental perks needs to be filled up completely to reach its ideal state if you want to actually use those master level destruction spells you better get that master destruction part rune master is a debatable skill but i'd still argue for it if you're using runes one of the few genuinely great additions to magic in skyr destruction has one thing going for it though it's not a super linear tree like some of the other trees you're relatively free to invest in most things without having to go too deep into the tree i start with prioritizing getting the novice and apprentice perks asap followed by both points in augmented flames and impact as soon as it's available this brings destruction to its absolute minimum viability state where i can start to stun lock things and do the most damage with firebolt without enchantments and potions i opt for fire because it's the cheapest to cast does the most damage and because magic efficiency just means better total dps overall it's even more damage effective fire also applies a tapering effect so even after the duration of the spell ends the enemy continues to take diminishing damage fire spells can be upgraded to make enemies flee if they are set on fire which is i prefer my enemies to stay in the fight so i don't have to aim as much and my followers can keep whacking on them frost is a good second element to get into after you've invested into fire it will slow enemies down damage their stamina which has debatable usefulness and it can get up to paralyzing enemies certain frost spells can hit their walls as i'm sure most skyrim players are painfully aware of it's a good crowd control effect until the player gets their hands on some decent cloak spells frost also lets you use ice spike spells which are fun as hell to use this is what the visceral magic of skyrim can feel like when it's done right shock is the last thing to invest in shock is the most expensive element to cast but it travels instantly and will damage target's magicka it can be upgraded to disintegrate enemies who are at or below 15 health but due to the rarity of mages in skyrim your mileage may vary with this one also because dragons use shouts and shouts don't consume magicka using shock damage on them is pointless it's better to just use the element opposite the dragon fire dragons use frost spells and vice versa shock also lets you use chain lightning which is really effective at hitting bunker down enemies or just causing chaos on the battlefield it will nuke your magicka but it's a fun counter to mages or you can put on a long lasting lightning cloak spell and just rush at enemy mages with a powerful ward put up shock is definitely situationally useful but it can be pretty slamming if used properly so that's the elements let's talk spell types this is the depressing part of skyrim's magic they added a bunch of new ways for destruction spells to work but refused to expand these things to include more than one spell per element and once again no spellcrafting so we can't even experiment with these types in order of potency we got spray missile rune area missile cloak heavy missile wall and storm the more potent the more matchguard costs gone is the old way of doing magic which was just touch target itself and within those we had the variables magnitude duration and range these new types attempt to bring those types and variables all under one consolidated roof but with varying results the spray spells i imagine are meant to be the replacement for touch as touch always had weird hitboxes but spray allows you to well spray the spells being able to drag the spell across the screen and spray an area is great despite the limited physical range and the admittedly wonky damage model from tapering the problem is that spell types correlate to spell level so all spray destruction spells are novice level all basic missile and runes are apprentice area missile and cloaker adept heavy missile and wall are expert and storms are mastered so spray spells become irrelevant after a point because their meager damage just won't be useful against a horde of high-level draugr even when the spray-ability of those spells are great in tight quarters with lots of enemies ignoring the magicka efficiency problem that ends up encouraging the player to stick to the lowest level basic missile spells the area of effect from the mid-tier missile spells limits its usefulness for two reasons first off you're paying magicka just to give it more splash as opposed to more base damage and secondly if you're fighting in a tight space with allies you're going to end up causing collateral damage this means you're really not going to be using your mid-tier missile spells all that often but the best point of comparison are the two standard missile spells firebolts is the apprentice version and incinerate is the expert version this gives us the fairest apples to apples comparison to demonstrate the insane damage drop off that higher level spells suffer from to do this i went ahead and made a spreadsheet with all the fire spells from all the different destruction spell types using serion at level 58 with all of his fancy enchanted gear and perks i could have used the base stats of each spell from the uesp but i wanted a realistic character to reflect numbers players might actually see in game i plugged each spells as damage and cost numbers listed in my spellbook and used those numbers to extrapolate things like efficiency total number of casts based off my character's total magicka a theoretical total damage amount based on total number of spells cast and a theoretical damage amount in a 10 second window for spells like fire cloak and wall flames a lot of these numbers are going to be unrealistically ideal and i'm also ignoring cast time so some spells efficiency will be lower in actual gameplay but the chart still helps visualize the relationship between these spells the relationship being this lower level spells are more magical efficient but higher level spells have a higher upfront damage output if you're fighting a room of low level skeletons you can easily drop firestorm and clear the room in a few seconds if you're fighting a big damage sponge dragon with 3071 hp then you need efficiency as the fight is going to be a battle of attrition in theory i don't mind this relationship and i imagine it was intentional to avoid lower level spells from becoming irrelevant after a point the thing is when you have two missile spells showing this much of a discrepancy and total damage output and no spell in between to act as middle ground there's a serious problem for those of you not looking at the screen here's the stats we're dealing with firebolts got a damage of 37 and a cast cost of five while incinerates got a damage of 90 and a cast cost of 39 with a total number of theoretical casts assuming zero magicka region between casts of 175 for firebolt and 19 for incinerate things are already not looking good that's 7.4 damage per 1 point magicka versus 2.31 damage per total damage 5 365 for firebolt and 1673 for incinerate so i will be able to finish killing an ancient dragon using only half my total magicka pool of using fireball but i need to re-up my entire magicka bar at least twice if i'm using incinerate assuming 1 damage per second this fight would take 83 seconds for firebolt and 34 seconds for incinerate not including time to refill my magicka so there is a noticeable difference in time to kill but is less than a minute time saved really worth having to chug all those potions i don't think so and that's why i'd always end up using firebolt in a fight like this but here's some crazier math just to give some perspective as to how underpowered incinerate is compared to firebolts to reach a similar magicka to damage efficiency incinerate needs a damage buff from 90 to 290 or a cost reduction from 39 magicka to 12. that's pretty much a 69 increase to damage or decrease to magical consumption this means incinerate is 69 less efficient than fireball cute i can't say for certain what the underlying reason was for why they'd make a system so backwards like this but i have some ideas it seems they wanted to make a system that lacked redundancy so they made a system that would in theory encourage players to apply specific types of spells for specific encounters in a sort of formulaic manner if i'm fighting this number of low-level draugr in this space at this range i'm going to use this exact spell type of this exact element they didn't want to invalidate low level spells so the efficiency factor was introduced and like i said i don't mind that trade-off but it's completely unacceptable to have that discrepancy be this wide in a game where level scaling ensures we will only be facing high level damage sponges by the time we get to unlocking those expensive high level spells those spells are already irrelevant i will almost never be in a situation where firestorm is a sane option in a fight because if i'm being flanked by three draugr they're gonna be death overlords with 1500 hp each so no i'm just going to sit in the back and keep hitting them with a firebolt and stun locking them if i'm feeling adventurous maybe i'll put up a fire cloak spell which is a very efficient spell that can be given even more range by chugging a fortified destruction potion so let's be done with talking numbers and instead discuss some of the nice things added to destruction a lot of the spells do feel quite unique including the different missile spells from each element this i suspect was another objective of theirs with this magic system as all the target spells of oblivion felt very similar unless i had an area of effect lightning and fire spells hit with pretty much the same impact though i think lightning traveled a little bit faster and the only noticeable difference was their visual and sound effects skyrim definitely rectified that and i wouldn't say any of the spells feel like they are lacking impact the short range of the geyser spells probably lends them the worst feeling overall and kinda makes me wish we had a way to turn flames into a genuine flamethrower spell but they still feel more satisfying than the basic target fire spells of oblivion cloak and rune spells though have to be my favorite additions cloak spells alone introduce opportunities for entirely new magic combat builds that could rely on cloak spells to deal extra damage when getting into melee combat meanwhile rune spells offer unique ways of bullying the simple-mindedness of enemy ai and cheese them with spawn traps they can be used as insta-cast spells by placing them under the feet of enemies and can be triggered from a distance by hitting them with ranged spells i don't use them as often as i should but that's really just because the magic gameplay of skyrim ends up lulling me into spamming fireball it really has nothing to do with the effectiveness of runes themselves my only complaints are that i can't have multiple runes even after getting the rune master perk and they are limited to just the three destruction elements no other school gets access to them or cloaks for that matter except with some opcc spells speaking of creation club one of the spells added made destruction one of the easiest skills to train in the entire game if you have the arcane accessories creation get yourself the unbound storm spell equip it in both hands cast and hold it while opening up your map then pick a destination on the other side of the map and arrive at your destination with your destruction scale maxed out i'd suggest traveling from one remote location to another remote location i use the lover stone and the shadowstone and dismiss any followers because you will piss off friendly npcs by shocking them with the spell rinse and repeat as many times and as many legendary cycles as you want and congratulations unlimited perk points so in conclusion despite the genuinely great additions of the new spell types and how much more weighty magic feels overall the rest of the destruction experience is just bad especially compared to oblivion not only are damage and effect types more limited damage skills for instance have been cut but the number of base destruction spells have been brought down to just 24 spells in vanilla skyrim seriously cutting down the amount of variety in the school and when more than half of the spells i've been casting as a pure major destruction spells a lack of variety is the last thing i want to be experiencing destruction isn't the only school lacking variety restoration might be the most anemic of all the schools vanilla restoration is home to just three spell effects healing wards and turn undead goodbye to curing poisons and diseases fortifying and restoring skills and attributes absorbing health fatigue magicka skills attributes and boosting resistances of all kinds of elements nope just healing wards and turn undead with turn undead just being a transplant from conjuration let's start with a new addition and the only aspect of restoration i like wards are spells that when cast put up a shield of sorts that nullify magic damage while boosting the armor rating of the caster words have some unique mechanics that make them more interesting than just being a summoned shield for one they aren't just conjured shields they are only active while the player is actively casting the spell two they have a charge up period of about one second before they reach their peak magnitude this means there's a very brief window where the caster is still vulnerable and makes it so that a caster can't keep putting up max hp wards if their initial ward is broken three when they absorb their rated amount of magic damage they break causing the caster to stop casting the spell and stagger though they won't take the remaining damage of the spell that has broken the ward 4 they continuously recharge themselves as long as the caster keeps the spell going so say the ward is rated to absorb 80 magica if a spell hits it for 60 it will recharge that 60 over a second or so going back up to its max hp that's the main way these spells work but they do have some other unique attributes as well they are very effective against dragon shots due to how shout damage is applied against the player the bursts of damage those shouts are made up of make it so that even the lowest level wards can fully absorb the strongest dragon shouts you can actually hear the tiny bursts of damage being absorbed by a ward when it's blocking a dragon shout not only that though it can absorb other shouts too like unrelenting force from draugr we can also get a perk that allows the player to absorb the magic of the spells cast at the ward acting as an on-demand 100 absorption spell rather than having a chance to proc like a normal spell absorption effect the war just transfers a percentage of the damage taken by the war to the player this isn't going to make it so the player can keep wards up forever but it's a nice little boost that can help a ward survive a little while longer especially against a spellcaster throwing a lot of heavy spells it also means we can get magika from blocking dragon shouts even though shouts don't have a magicka cost normally needed for absorption to work if a ward is dual casted it will increase the hp of the ward and put the full ward up immediately avoiding the charge up phase so i guess dual casting restoration isn't completely useless if you're using it to dual cast wards but just keep in mind this is going to chew through a lot of magicka to combat that the cost of wards can be reduced down to zero from enchantments that reduce the cost of restoration spells and of course more skill levels in restoration i honestly don't have much negative things to say about wards except we probably could have used a couple more powerful ones and a couple more related perks they're well balanced to ensure its viability for defensive magic players but powerful enough that you can realistically build characters around them though probably as a melee paladin type character because the magicka cost for using wards is going to reduce magicka needed for all those weak destruction spells if they're one of those things that i always feel guilty for not using but the main reason is that they are associated with restoration and the rest of the school is so barren that i can never really justify putting points into cost reduction perks and the wart absorb perk the reason restoration sucks is that wards are the only interesting spell in the school turn undead has always been a really strange effect that never really made any sense to me why cast turn undead when i can just kill the undead instead sure it's a form of crowd control but if i wanted crowd control abilities i just invest in illusion get master of the mind and have access to way more abilities that will affect anything not just undead granted master of the mind requires 90 illusion to unlock and it's at the end of the tree so turn undead can be seen as a cheap alternative to that but turn undead does turn out to be a great spell for power leveling restoration which is something anyone wanting 100 in the school will most likely have to resort to because training the skill is just way too slow oblivion's restoration skill was a slog to train but it at least had all of those buff and resistance spells to help a restoration-focused character train that skill organically oblivion still heavily encouraged power leveling because of its stingy xp rewards but i'd say skyrim is even worse in skyrim the only way to get restoration xp is either healing health damage absorbing damage with wards or turning undead opponents out in the wild these aren't common events especially for magic players but the xp requirements of the skill just don't reflect that this leads to restoration lagging behind other schools including conjuration and alteration where the player may only cast one spell from each of those schools every couple of minutes after a point the player has to buckle down and grind levels if they want to get some of the really useful perks of the restoration tree like necromage which makes all spells more effective against undead including destruction spells the restoration tree is weird because it has some of the best perks a mage player could ask for but mage players probably won't be using restoration spells often might as well use potions instead and save that magicka for other spells especially when mage characters usually have small health pools anyway this only further encourages resorting to power leveling frankly restoration as a school seems more geared towards paladin players but those mage perks make it nearly impossible to ignore the school as a mage maybe this is why everyone makes fun of colette in the mages college telling her restoration isn't a real school of magic the only thing left to discuss are the healing spells themselves nothing super interesting about them but like with destruction bethesda mixed things up with how the mechanics of each spell works some healing spells are a whole to cast spell another improvement over oblivion's casting mechanics this is an intuitive method of healing that lets players conserve their magicka by only healing what they need this sort of spell is great for players with low pools of health and is thus a better healing spell for pure mages unfortunately it's a low level spell so it's a little bit slower at higher levels then we have burst healing spells useful for players with larger health pools but they usually have a bit of a charge up time as opposed to the instant cast healing over time spells there are also spells for healing others useful for keeping npc followers and summons alive the expert level healing spell will heal everyone around the player which pairs well with some of the illusion party buffing spells this once more makes me wonder the purpose for turn undead if restoration and illusion synergize so well with each other the master spell for the school will throw down a circle that will hit undead with a powerful turn on dead effect while simultaneously healing the caster if they are standing within it it's okay but underwhelming overall compared to some of the other schools master spells furthering my overall impression that restoration was just a neglected afterthought alright alteration time i actually don't have much to criticize about this school it's a solid school and skill in general when compared to some of the other magic schools the only magic effects to make it to skyrim from oblivion are shield spells and water breathing of all things but they made up for it by bringing new effects in to replace the old ones so what's disappeared from alteration and magic entirely burden feather elemental shields water walking technically and open locks we'll start with that last one first because it's an odd removal the skyrim decided to do away with unlock spells entirely meaning the only way to unlock things is lock picking which would be a much bigger problem if lock picking actually required investing perk points into it but with skyrim now sporting the lock picking mini game from fallout 3 the act of picking locks has become entirely player skill based lock picks are so abundant in loot that they never act as a barrier for any player even remotely skilled in the mini game this turned lock picking into a universal skill so i guess the logic was why should we bother giving magic players a way to circumvent lock picking after all melee characters never had a way of getting through locks so why should mages they kept the tower standing stone which lets players get through an expert or lower level lock once a day but that's as much as we're going to get with unlocked spells i find the submission quite stupid and the opportunity to finally add a way for melee characters to reliably circumvent locks should have been the priority here not removing spells to get through locks even if it just meant making unlocked spell scrolls abundant for melee characters i just don't see the logic of backing off on unlock spells and screwing both mages and melee characters i've been trying to avoid discussing spells added by expansions in croatian club but i'm going to make an exception here to note fenrik's welcome which had an unlock aspect to it it's a creation club spell that makes the caster invisible and allows them to unlock expert and lower locks but it's classified as an illusion spell because of the invisibility aspect i guess the idea is that this is meant to allow thieves to just walk into any locked buildings without alerting anyone which is quite overpowered and definitely on brand with the other brokenly opcc spells i'm not upset over the removal of burden as it always shared space with paralyzed and seemed redundant the fact that it belonged to different schools helped differentiate them in oblivion but skyrim patched over that by just moving paralyzed from illusion over to alteration however i am annoyed with the removal of feather considering the effect still exists quite abundantly in skyrim just under the name fortify carry weight that effect though is exclusive to alchemy and enchanting why why can't we have a bunch of alteration spells that just modify my carry weight low carry weight is something of a concern for mages just another reason to have a train of followers why can't we have access to the effect in spell form surprisingly even creation club never bothered to rectify this with some broken op spell border walking i'm completely indifferent of its removal and it's still technically in the game it's just not an effect a player can cast or enchant with i'm actually surprised water breathing made the cut i always felt these two always went hand in hand but bethesda felt otherwise if anything water walking would have been more useful in skyrim because we can't attack underwater anymore meaning slaughterfish are an even bigger nuisance whereas running out of air while swimming has literally never been an issue for me in skyrim i don't like advocating for the removal of spell effects in a game that's already starved for them but i really have no use for any of these water-based abilities they would have to make some changes to the way swimming works in order to make these actually useful the elemental shields were probably my least used effects in oblivion and i'm not at all surprised they are gone in skyrim they had their use in oblivion because resistance spells resided in restoration so elemental shields allowed players looking to avoid that skill to still flirt with elemental resistances but in a game like oblivion where inter-school spells were a thing a mage skilled in both schools would likely just make a combined spell where the ratio of shield to element resistance was under their control and that neatly brings us to the sole survivor worth analyzing the shield effect works pretty much identically to how it did in oblivion by just straight up applying armor rating to the player this can be seen in the player's stats when hovering over armor in the player's inventory something that also works to see the effect of wards being cast and is also a really cumbersome method of getting this information because the ui is terrified of showing players numbers i much more prefer skyrim's implementation of shields because of the way it works with things like dual casting and the perks we get in the alteration tree because spell effectiveness was removed there's pretty much nothing stopping magic players from equipping armor aside from the extra carry weight and movement speed penalties the mage armor perks offer an incentive for mages to opt for the unarmored lifestyle though by substantially upping the protection from shield spells couple that with some of the other perks in the tree like stability which increases the duration of alteration spells even more atronach which permanently applies a 30 spell absorption effect and magic resistance which does exactly as it says offering up to 30 percent alteration and shield spells makes it so that magic players can forego armor without missing it all that much it still doesn't stack up against a fully tempered set of daedric armor but pure mages are supposed to be on the frail side anyway granted that's supposed to come with a lot of offensive power but we've already talked enough about that that's pretty much it for the tree it's simple but effective it's perks play towards making alteration the defense skill for mages which is kinda weird because that's only one of the spells in the school but i appreciate mages at least have options for protection the rest of the alteration spell book feels like a collection of misfit effects that just didn't find a home in the more cohesive schools these are effects like paralysis light spells detect life and undead and the truly peculiar spells like telekinesis equilibrium and transmute paralysis is what you would expect it's a very high level effect with two spells being expert and master level the expert one is just a target spell to paralyze a target for 10 seconds dual casting getting the stability perk and using potions to fortify alteration will increase the duration quite a bit more which is always appreciated the master spells an aoe of 40 feet centered on the player a fun thing to drop in the middle of combat just make sure you don't hit your allies light spells come in two flavors target and self-cast target lets you stick a ball of light to any surface or npc which can be amusing to mess around with or to mark an enemy to help you track it but otherwise the usefulness of the spell is limited self-cast is the one that i used a lot in dungeons and dark areas but it wears off after a short time even with dual casting and stability really the usefulness of light spells is questionable in general because skyrim is just a very bright game even in the dead of night or in the depths of the darkest dungeons the game doesn't really get very dark as skyrim insists on flooding the screen with tons of ambient light coming from invisible sources great for people with cheap screens but ugly and distracting for others i really only was using the spells to boost brightness of my footage for the sake of the video otherwise i probably would have just gone without them detect life and its undead equivalent were spells i didn't even know existed there's a shout that does the exact same thing so i never expected there'd also be a spell good thing there is though because detect life is a great way to power level alteration this really seems like a skill better fit for illusion because it's not going to be useful for characters outside of stealth characters and now we're up to the misfits telekinesis is really something i have no experience with and another effect i had no idea even existed in skyrim i'm genuinely surprised it made the cut as it belonged to mysticism and was one of the less popular effects of mysticism to boot fun to mess around with but that's about it it can be exploited for training purposes in a similar way to unbound storm drop an item on the ground pick it up with telekinesis and hold it while you're opening your map then just pick a destination far away on the map and fast travel there equilibrium allows the player to trade health for matchka which is a neat idea but poorly implemented and not nearly fleshed out enough to bring it to where it would be a cornerstone for a proper character build all the spell does is damage the player's health 25 points and restores 25 points matchka which is already a weak effect if i have a magical portal of 750 and a health pool of 250 even if i bring myself to the brink of death i'm only getting 225 matchka it's not going to do a whole lot this spell would need a few perks and probably a few versions to make it something worth pursuing also it scales with the difficulty setting in a strange way anything higher than adapt will hurt the player more but still only give 25 magika finally we got transmute truly one of the strangest spells added to skyrim for so many reasons for starters it can't be bought anywhere the only tome exists in the bandit camp near whiterun this is strange because it's an apprentice level spell that lets the caster turn iron or into silver ore and silver ore into gold ore so these bandits had this tome moved into an iron mine set up a forge and stuff but considering the bannons aren't drowning in gold ore i guess they just couldn't use the spell for one reason or another this is also strange because this has given me the same vibes the clear sky shout gives me in that if something like this exists why isn't everyone learning it and just tanking the economies of tamriel the empire is on a gold standard after all seeing as the symptoms are minted from gold so what's the deal here obviously we aren't meant to think too much about it just take the spell and use it but even in that context i'm left wondering why this spell actually exists it's not like it contributes to any greater design no perks or other spells directly interact with it just kind of exists in reality it was probably just the work of a lone devotee who just added the spell on a whim without any thought given to the greater implications of the spell's existence or its impact on gameplay as a whole it just sounded cool so they added it i'm not complaining though i like things like this little additions that you have to go out of your way to find and you can just as easily ignore if you don't like how it impacts the game my only suggestion is that they should have hidden it in some higher level dungeons in the reach instead putting it just outside of whiterun ensures a lot of players are going to find it on accident especially if they decide to do some radiant abandoned bounties in whiterun because this is one of the first locations those sorts of quests are going to send them to the spell probably should have been an expert level spell too other than that i really appreciate its existence and it makes mining something a mage might consider getting into because they can turn a very nice profit making jewelry and enchanting that jewelry is a nice way to train enchant was a skill in morrowind that didn't make the cut for oblivion in oblivion enchanting was tied to the player's skill level for each school of magic and their knowledge of spells for each school this made enchanting look more like a different form of spell making than its own dedicated discipline skyrim brought it back as a skill but morrowind players will barely recognize it as the mechanics of how enchanting works and how items use their enchantments has changed drastically between these three games skyrim more or less just solidified the mechanics from oblivion into its own skill and slapped on some incremental power gains as perks in the tiny skill tree as a whole it's a pretty good skill with a ton of value to offer the player but some glaring oversights make it another universal skill that any player will want to play with but unlike lock picking which doesn't need a single perk point investment to make it usable enchanting requires some heavy investment going back to oblivion there's a few things that worked in that system's favor to reduce the need for non-magic players getting invested in it for starters it wasn't a skill so unlike skyrim where players have to literally invest via perk points the player didn't need to give something up in order to use it sure they needed to have certain levels in certain schools of magic but that's not as taxing as skyrim's perk requirements secondly we had sigil stones from oblivion gates that allowed anyone to enchant equipment without needing spells or soul gems just activate the stone pick the item to enchant and the stone automatically applied one of the two effects this coupled with the fact that sigil stones offered enchantments that were better than anything the player could apply themselves meant that melee and stealth characters wouldn't be left wanting for enchanted items thirdly enchanted gear spawned as dungeon loot all the time the game was certainly too liberal with its distribution of those items but the fact that non-enchanting players could still find enchanted gear in the game world itself meant that player enchants weren't as critical sure the player wasn't guaranteed to find the exact item with the exact enchantment they wanted but that gap left the incentive to pursue enchanting for a specific stuff but if the play was flexible and down to compromise the random loot system scratched the itch pretty well skyrim unfortunately did away with all of that heavily incentivizing players of all styles to get into enchanting not only that players have to go hard on the skill because some of the top perks like extra effect are just too powerful to leave out thanks to global level scaling players need to always be looking for ways to boost their damage output and damage resistance upgrading gear at a forge will only cover that for so long eventually the player is going to need enchanted gear they can find some stuff out in the wild but it's not nearly as frequent as oblivion making it something that even accepting compromises isn't going to make dependable it all leads back to players needing to work on enchanting this would have been a great time to bring back enchanting services from morrowind ok so pretty much any player is going to want to get into enchanting what does that look like the skill tree itself is almost entirely incremental power increases to the potency of enchants which is a bit of a letdown the first perk enchanter has five levels to it just giving straight bonuses to all enchants the left branch of the tree is a linear progression to buff elemental enchantments which is questionable the destruction tree thoughtfully made each element its own branch because they are meant to be equals in their effects and trade-offs in putting them in a line enchantment seems to be ranking them it looks like it's suggesting electric effects are more sought after than fire but maybe they just wanted to put the most popular effect to lower down so people didn't have to invest into the other two i don't know but woe onto the player who just wanted to slap an electric damage enchantment on their anti-mage sword the middle path is more incremental perks buffing stat effects and the right gives some questionable bonuses like getting a bit more power out of soul gems when recharging items and getting a very paltry charge refund on items when landing a killing blow on creatures but not humans so nothing game or playstyle changing here except extra effect requiring the player to enchant all new gear because we can't re-enchant items already enchanted the procedure for enchanting has remained relatively the same from oblivion grab some filled soul gems go to an enchanting station select the item you wish to enchant the enchantment you want and maybe tweak the magnitude of the effect if it's a weapon enchantment the only difference is being how common enchantment stations are and where effects are sourced from in oblivion enchantment stations were gated behind the iron gates of the arcane university which was just another reason non-magic characters might be dissuaded from getting into the art of custom enchantments unless the player has frost crack spire installed then it's just a few thousand gold away instead i guess with the fall of the mages guild there's no regulatory body to keep the art from the masses shame that people didn't grab the spellcrafting altars during the estate sale when it comes to sourcing effects instead of coming from the player's spell book the enchantment effects are now a different spell book the player has to fill by disenchanting items they find in the game to learn the effects this destroys the item in the process so the player has to decide whether it's worth it this also gives a nice amount of xp for the skill that can exclusively level the skill pretty well for a while disenchanting acts as the gatekeeper for higher end effects as opposed to locking it behind player stats it also feels a bit more meaningful to fill out my enchanting spell book this way as opposed to just running to a spell shop and finding a bunch of cheap versions of the effect i'd want and with enchanters found in dungeons disenchanting is another option players can consider when they are doing inventory management in a dungeon and looking to lighten their load i would have liked to see disenchanting being more than a one-time deal though once an effect is learned players can't disenchant items with the same effect it would have been neat if we could continue to break down items with those enchants to increase the base magnitude of the effects in our book keeping the game of should i vendor this or disenchant this going for a little while longer soul gems themselves have remained identical to their oblivion counterpart and everything but appearance they range in ranks from petty to grand and that correlates to the size of the soul that can fit in it just like in oblivion and marwind you have to manage your gems carefully because you can end up putting a petty soul into a grand gem in essence wasting the gem after three games i'm convinced this isn't an oversight but an intended gameplay element as tedious and annoying as it can be did you fill those soul gems like i asked you yes although idiot those are hard to find next time don't fill it at all if you can't do it properly this is because we don't have a way of knowing the size of the creature's soul outside of experimentation or looking it up online because nothing in the ui will report that information either make the system regulate itself so i won't load a bad soul into a gem or let me see the rank of the creature's soul the process of trapping souls to fill gems can also be pretty tedious but we'll talk about that when looking at conjuration which is now the new home for soul trapping with the death of mysticism now it's time to talk about the thing i've been alluding to this whole video enchanting gear for followers so here's the thing a lot of enchantments just don't work on followers most skill fortifications straight up won't work along with some attribute fortifications it's easier just to look at what effects do work on followers which the uesp has a handy list of to take all the guesswork and experimentation out of i gotta hand it to the people who devoted the time to figuring out what effects work on followers it's hard enough to figure out how something like magical regen works for the player thanks to a lack of feedback from the game figuring out how that works for followers had to be a really frustrating process to say the least looking at this tiny list of effects that actually work for followers really limits what i had to consider when gearing up lydia and jordis this playthrough as well considering certain effects can only be applied to certain types of equipment like health bonuses to chess pieces enchanting gear for followers feels more like a game of tetris and something involving a lot of thought strategy and planning with that said by the time i was done enchanting everything for my followers i wasn't really left wanting even nearing level 60 fighting ancient dragons jordis was able to tank the dragon herself no problem the key was giving her gear that boosted her survivability this included making her completely immune to fire damage boosting her heavy armor skill boosting her magic resistance and boosting her health even so some slots are just kind of a waste like the glove slot you can use those slots to boost carry weight which is alright i suppose but between jordis held on myself running out of carrier weight just was never really a concern admittedly the enchantments could be better and i never updated her with new gear after getting the two effects perk but i never bothered to update it because even with her current setup jordis was just an unkillable juggernaut this secret was the sword i gave her which was just a basic ebony sword untempered because i don't have anything invested in smithing with a low magnitude lifesteal effect this made it so that she would be healing herself as she attacks things which does a lot to increase her survivability the low magnitude aspect is to maximize the number of charges on the sword which resulted in me never having to recharge the sword not once between lydia and jordus both main handing the thing that i have to recharge the sword that might be an indication of how little they actually swung the thing or it might be due to some weird bug that has follower weapons not using charges sometimes i'm not too sure but i'm not complaining with filer equipment out of the way let's talk about the other thing i kept alluding to and that's how i was training my enchanting skill in general in the beginning i was just relying on disenchanting to get my levels but that method tapers off as the skills increase and the number of enchantments left to collect diminish i eventually switched to enchanting jewelry that i was crafting but that has more of an involved procedure than it might sound at first so i already mentioned transmute and how it's a nice spell for mages for just this purpose what i'd been doing the entire playthrough was collecting every iron ore i could find i saw some in a shop i'd buy it if i saw an iron or vein in the wild i'd mine it i'd also collect any silver and gold ore that i could find but i prioritized iron quite a bit i also held onto any gems i picked up mining or veins like corundum just for the gems i could collect from it then i'd return to white run from time to time and just sit there transmuting orange melting it into bars i made sure to also make some silver ingots which was a process that made me intimately familiar with the behavior of the inventory screens of skyrim something i learned was that the cursor on pc remained on the item you last interacted with before closing the inventory screen a much appreciated behavior that made it easier to find and drop the silver ore out of my inventory so as not to transmute it to gold on the next cast this is probably going to be the only time i compliment something related to skyrim's vanilla ui then i'd just go over to the forge and make the most valuable jewelry i could using the gems i'd been hoarding this is not only a fantastic way to make money it's also the best way to train smithing and you can bet i'll be doing this on all my characters to train their smithing levels when it comes time to play melee and stealth characters this is because all crafting skills award xp proportionate to the value of the items produced well not enchanting but we'll get to that in a second so producing a diamond gold necklace awards much more xp than iron daggers requires less materials and requires less carry weight because you don't have to lug around leather and tons of iron ore and what you produce is much more valuable and isn't just some trash you'll dump into adriana vinci's inventory when you're done crafting them the beauty of this is then turning around and using that jewelry to train enchanting because enchanting items just award street xp agnostic to the value of the item produced you have two options here throw tons of cheap enchants on items to get the most enchants done and save your good gems for items you actually want to use or spend the high level gems anyways because producing the items with high level enchantments still has a multiplicative effect on the gold value of the item i usually went with using my high level gems to produce the most expensive effects on the most valuable jewelry that i'd forged so i might take that gold diamond necklace and use a grand soul gem to throw a fortify sneak effect this produced what i would call bankruptcy items because they'd be worth several times more than what vendors had available and just wait until we get to talking about skill trainers and how i use these items to get high level magic training for free at the college of winterhold once i depleted my high level gems or my super valuable jewelry items i'd switch to slapping cheap low level enchants on things just for the xp still trying to use the most valuable effects like fortify sneak because not all effects are created equal monetarily speaking in skyrim i have no idea what influences the value of these effects but it seems stealth effects are generally more valuable than the others even the arbitrary value of enchantments favor stealth players and that's what i did to grind levels in enchantment while making myself outrageously wealthy i used my funds to pour tons of money into training alchemy for a while but like i said eventually switching to train my other magic skills especially the slow ones to train like destruction but that's a story for later some closing thoughts on enchanting then overall i like the system but it's got many faults it feels a little on the weak side partly due to certain effects not being available to apply to items like fortifying destruction spell damage but also because effect magnitudes cap out at fairly low numbers for example even with stacking fortify enchantment effects i'm only able to make a circuit that gives around plus 70 magica while my ratio already gives me plus 50. 70 is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of master level spells being a master in enchanting should at least ensure i can cast another master level spell from just boosting my magicka pool i can stack magic a cost reduction for specific magic schools making it so i can say cast destruction spells for free which does feel a bit exploity but i'll take what i can get other effects like weapon enchants can feel a little underwhelming and overall i just don't appreciate that in order to get what i'd consider competent effects i need to really stack my levels like i said earlier this makes it so that even a warrior has to make this a major skill to invest in if they want to scale their damage and survivability i really wish we just had access to other forms of enchanting like sigil stones or professional enchanters like in morrowind not only for non-magic players but also for magic players enchanting and recharging items was one of the only money sinks i had in oblivion and in mar when it was even more expensive if it existed in skyrim i'd probably just opt to let the professionals handle my enchanting needs no matter how expensive because there's so many money making methods in this game that we're going to be talking about something even more lucrative than jewelry making when we talk alchemy the fact that i can't even get my items recharged from vendors and skyrim like i could in oblivion is a major contributor to my wealth constantly ballooning until i stop looting inductions altogether enchanting is the perfect answer to this problem professional crafters not just enchanters would in general be the best solution here but now it's time to switch gears and talk about a school adjacent to enchanting as a whole conjuration has probably changed the least out of any of the other schools between oblivion and skyrim this is probably because there wasn't a whole lot to conservation in bolivian to begin with so there wasn't much they could have cut that's not to say things weren't cut and streamlined summoning armor for instance has been cut entirely i never really saw the purpose of being able to summon all the different pieces of armor and i guess bethesda didn't see the purpose either they should have just made a summon armor spell that gave players a full set of armor maybe give us a light and a heavy version and a separate summon shield spell but bethesda just acts the whole thing entirely as well a lot of the summonable creatures from oblivion are gone probably because they don't exist in skyrim but they didn't replace them with anything as a result the total number of summons in vanilla skyrim is pretty low the expansions added several new summons while the creation club went hog wild and adding new ones but we didn't get nothing in return for all those cuts in fact i'd argue conservation is the only school bethesda did right with how they streamlined it in cleaning up the edges of the school they focused on making each spell occupy some unique space in the conjuration experience while bound items were trimmed down quite a bit they did a lot to make bound weapons feel very distinct from regular weapons and make it so the player not only could create characters around bound weapons but actually might want to and same with summons sure we lost some creatures but we finally have necromancy spells to resurrect dead enemies and it works surprisingly well let's start with bound weapons i'll admit i don't have much experience with them and using them on this character wouldn't really make much sense because bound weapons are still weapons raising their relevant skills and all that but these are more than just daedric level weapons that can be spawned on command because there are a few perks in the extensive conjuration tree to do things like make bound weapons cast soul trap and banish summon daedra and astronauts and turn undead those banished effects also work up to level 99 enemies so they're often going to be better than any actual spells the player can cast to do those things not only that this means players don't have to invest in those schools and those spells and spend magicka casting them as a low level player you can dominate with this thing and as a high level player you can still rely on it for its vanishing and soul trapping you might want to eventually pick up a real sword when you start to hit tougher enemies that an untempered daedric sword just won't cut against but that's fine because bound weapons don't weigh anything necromancy is pretty much what you'd expect a welcome addition to the elder scrolls but a little disappointing in its implementation we get a few spells that differ in how powerful of a body we can resurrect so low level spells can only bring back low level enemies with higher level spells and dual casted spells allowing us to raise more powerful foes the disappointing aspect comes in the perks these just come down to making them last longer and giving them extra health that's very unimaginative for the black arts where are the perks that let my thralls raise foes themselves or letting me spread diseases and plagues it's even more lacking in imagination when you realize these are the exact same perks as the ones in the other branch related to summon astronauts summoner is another uninspired perk as it just extends the distance we can summon things twins is about the only exciting perk on this side of the tree and all that does is allow us to summon one extra thing remove a level of summoner and let us invest two points into twin souls to at least get three minions on the field i don't know maybe this was just a limitation due to 2011 console hardware or something what i like about necromancy and normal summons is that they are not re-skinned versions of each other if you bring back two drug or death lords you're getting access to their full arsenal of moves shouts and all this is probably why things like zombies and skeletons aren't dedicated conjuration spells just bring them back to life if you encounter them out in the wild same with all the creatures like bears and trolls having spells to independently spawn all of them might turn out to be a little redundant it also makes being a necromancer a lot more unpredictable and in my opinion a lot more fun and rewarding i started using the master level necromancy spell which brings powerful bodies back to life permanently until they are slain anyways when i was doing dragonborn and i got pretty excited whenever i'd come across some really high level bandit chiefs or abandoned mages because that gave me access to some pretty powerful allies even better is that so long as their bodies aren't turned to ash or something you can keep bringing them back to life no matter how many times they get slain it really helps differentiate the summoner lifestyle and the necromancer lifestyle all that's left to discuss is soul trapping which really felt like a last-minute addition to the conjuration school evidenced by the complete lack of soul trap related perks for the longest time i thought we were only able to cast soul trap on one enemy at a time until someone in my discord informed me otherwise and i went and tested it for myself turns out there appears to be no limit on the number of creatures we can soul trap at one time you just need to make sure they die before the spell duration expires originally i was going to propose perks that increased those limits but seeing as they don't actually exist i'll take a different approach and suggest perks that would allow soul trap effects to do things like weaken opponents causing physical damage or even just a movement speed penalty some sort of effect that will give soul trap a slight offensive edge to it this would help the game pad out the lacking offensive debuff effects and help make soul trapping a little easier as it stands soul trapping is a tedious process in skyrim that doesn't really get any better i've been trying to avoid bringing up mods here but apocalypse spells adds a soul trap cloak spell that will trap souls of anyone slain close to the player as long as the cloak is active that's a simple but brilliant way to simplify the procedure or better yet give us soul trap spells that will guarantee we won't waste gems by filling them with weaker souls than the gem is rated for or soul trap spells that will let us say store two petty souls in a lesser gem to make a lesser soul this is why bound weapons with the soul trap perk is pretty cool it's one of the very few ways the player can streamline that process without slapping it on their weapon as an enchantment there's not a whole lot to say about conjuration it's one of my favorite skills in the game because it synergizes well with so many other skills and so many characters if i was doing a melee or stealth character with a touch of magic conjuration would be my first consideration thanks to bound weapons and the perks that they come with soul trapping and the universally helpful nature of summons in this game yes alchemy is technically a stealth skill now but it historically has always been a magic skill and that really didn't change with the leap to skyrim the only thing that makes it a stealth skill is its placement in the skill screen and three perks related to poisons for those reasons and because sarian has a good setup for it i'm just going to cover it all here first let me demonstrate just how powerful alchemy can be for a player [Music] okay [Music] oh for those of you just listening that was the second strongest dragon in vanilla skyrim destroyed on legendary difficulty in a few seconds using only firebolt that was achieved using one potion of fortified destruction 179 percent a poison of weakness to fire 108 percent and a poison to weakness to magic 72 percent if you're wondering why it's fire breath did practically nothing sarian is almost immune to fire damage thanks to some enchanted gear the thing is is that these potions were made in vanilla skyrim with no exploits i optimized the [ __ ] out of my brewing but that was achieved just using what's available to all players simply maximize and that's the key to skyrim's alchemy system investing optimizing and stacking effects so this meant i had 100 alchemy which is very easy to achieve i'll explain in just a second all five levels of the alchemist perk the physician perk the benefactor perk and the poisoner kirk this by itself will guarantee some decent results but the key is stacking the highest fortify alchemy enchantments possible this requires 100 enchanting which is admittedly not as straightforward as alchemy and all the relevant perks to maximize beneficial stat enchantments then i brewed up the best fortify enchantment potion i could manage enchanted a helmet some gloves a ring and an amulet with plus 37 fortified alchemy so stacked i was looking at somewhere around 150 percent extra strength you don't have to go absolutely crazy with enchanting to start making killer potions even with only two items that are giving me plus 60 i'm still able to craft some very good items that will stack well but if you're playing skyrim somewhat optimally you're probably invested into enchanting to some degree so make the best stuff you can on all four slots fortify alchemy works on and get brewing because alchemy xp is rewarded based on the value of the item created it's shockingly easy to power level to 100. it might actually be the easiest skill to level once you have enough of some very mundane regions assuming this isn't comparing to the glitch abuse for leveling destruction and alteration the most valuable potion in the game can be brewed from garlic which is readily available in alchemy shops and inns nordic barnacles which can be found all over the northern coast of skyrim and salmon row which is the trickiest of the three to acquire but after just about 30 minutes of farming i had plenty to train my skill probably two times over salmon row can only be harvested off of dead salmon killing salmon only requires one level of unrelenting force and a school of salmon and a still body of water to shout at i use the body of water outside of the solitude docks but there are many other locations that salmon shouting can be achieved you can't shout while swimming so i used a combination of the surrounding docks and land to scream at the fish and sometimes i managed to pull off this tricky backwards hop out of the water that would let me pop off a quick shout it's really not bad and you won't be needing that much maybe 40 of each ingredient which could probably take about a couple hours tops to collect the next thing to do is once again fortify your alchemy as much as possible if you're doing this at a very low level your options are going to be limited but you can always make up for that deficit by just farming more ingredients it doesn't matter once you're done crafting these potions you're going to have enough potions to bankrupt all the alchemy and general goods vendors for the rest of your playthrough during my testing i crafted over 300 000 gold worth of these potions and a few others i crafted using common ingredients needless to say alchemy is absurdly profitable and makes my enchanting scheme look like blue chip investments during the meme stunt craze and that's really it now you have the keys to breaking skyrim however you please with any character you want alchemy has something for everyone and it's a very solid support skill to invest in following enchantment it can be a tough sell for a lot of characters though because if you have to invest in smithing and enchanting picking up a third crafting skill to invest in is going to suck what makes matters worse is that the alchemy park tree in general kinda sucks there's virtually no reason to invest in any of the perks outside of the ones i mentioned earlier purity is a trap that will diminish the value of your concoctions snake blood is another trap because there's so many ways to get poisoned resistance like spell absorption and 50 poison resistance is just green thumb to double the amount of stuff you harvest is okay but with houses from hearthfire and all the cc added ones like the farm you can just grow whatever you really need and never worry about running out of ingredients again concentrated poisons lets you get two uses out of any applied poison which could be useful but i'd only consider that if poisons are my main damage dealing regimen if you want to get purity for some reason i mean if you don't care about potion values purity can be helpful for explaining what you can make and you have no interest in investing in the poison side of the tree then you gotta get a point in experimenter why is experimenter not its own branch i mean i guess that would mean the tree wouldn't look like a vial what's even more dumb is that if you want green thumb you have to get the poison perks why alright let's talk about experimenter for those of you unaware every alchemy ingredient in skyrim has four effects but we don't know any of those effects when you first start the game experimenting with ingredients can reveal some effects but the best way to learn the effects in game is eating them eating an ingredient reveals the first effect experimenter allows more effects to be revealed after eating them one perk gives two effects two perks gives three and three perks reveals all four it's tempting to invest in but it's also kind of [ __ ] three perk points is an expensive investment for a convenience like this i don't care what build you're going for as well getting the final perk requires 90 alchemy if you've beaten the dragonborn dlc you get access to skill tree respecking which will refund all the perk points in a tree so you could pump three points into those perks eat everything to reveal their effects then respec and spend those points elsewhere or you can do what i do and just use the uesp to tell you what items do what i really don't like experimenter i understand bethesda wanted to make a system with alchemy that encourages players to test things out but this can lead to a lot of wasted ingredients and i really don't want to be wasting things like wisp wrappings which are very rare we can come across recipes that will tell us some simple potions we can mix up but these are pretty rare items as well and alchemy vendors usually don't have many to sell having substantially more recipes out in the game and maybe letting us bring ingredients to alchemists to identify for us for a fee would have helped a lot here but i have a different proposal what if we had mastery perks from oblivion but in skyrim you see oblivion had perks for each skill they were just forgotten by a lot of players because there was no dedicated screen for seeing them when a skill reached levels 25 50 75 and 100 they'd achieve apprentice journeyman expert and master levels respectively each new mastery level came with a perk in alchemy's case it meant a new effect for every ingredient was revealed this makes sense a more experienced alchemist will probably know more about the ingredients that they are working with oblivion system didn't allow for experimentation because items that didn't have effects revealed couldn't have them revealed until the necessary mastery perk was unlocked and you couldn't mix items freely like you can in skyrim my proposal for skyrim is to bring that system back for all the skills starting with alchemy this would look very similar to what it did in oblivion 25 50 75 and 100 would get another level of the experimenter perk let players continue to experiment with ingredients to unlock effects just as it exists now and just give them another level of that perk this still retains the spirit of experimentation and still requires the player to eat ingredients to discover their effects it's not unlocked automatically like an oblivion this means the player still has to sacrifice over the course of the game do i eat this giant's toad now with only two levels of experimenter or do i wait until i get all three levels to discover all the effects and only lose one toe a system like this would remove a lot of the boring perks that just consume perk points for no serious game all those spell level perks from the other schools of magic just become mastery perks so when i hit 100 destruction i get the perk to discount master level spells in oblivion a journeyman of destruction outright couldn't cast master spells because they didn't have the appropriate level even if they had the magicka to cast it i like how skyrim removed that limitation because it gives players more options maybe i'll just stack cost reduction gear and potions so i can pop off a couple of high level spells for this fight i like systems that provide as many options as i can but certain tactics might just require sacrificing a lot to access it and that's really what giving access to mastery perks would allow it would help remove the tediousness of a lot of these trees and allow for implementing more perks that will fundamentally change how a character plays creating unique playstyles and character builds that encourages subsequent playthroughs and in the spirit of that i'd also like to see the pestle and mortar return from oblivion i like the idea of centralized crafting stations because it encourages carefully planning before heading out on adventures but it's very easy to burn through your potions because you got ambushed by a random dragon bring back the pestle and mortar and let players make weaker potions out in the field in a pinch i imagine most players would use this to make some emergency healing items with whatever they've been able to scrounge together while we're at it maybe make it so brewing stations can also dilute potions to make more potions from the ones that we can find out in the wild adding even more value to the benefit of brewing stations there are a lot of brewing stations out in dungeons just like enchanters but i still would have liked to have seen some sort of on-demand system all in all alchemy is a pretty fun skill that can make some stupidly powerful playstyles viable this sort of fun is what is mostly missing from the lives of magic players with the absence of spellcrafting it's a shame because just screwing around with this system while i was doing some testing to write this section was probably some of the most fun i had while playing sarian it immediately made me want to start another playthrough where i rushed to maximize alchemy just to see how broken of a character i could make it's easy to immediately write this skill off because without fortifications from enchanting a low alchemy skill level and no perks invested into the tree the potions you get are quite pitiful it takes work and dedication to make the skills show what it's capable of but that's honestly how it should be if you want to regulate the power of a skill don't put in hard caps and cut effects just work in some hurdles that the player has to work to overcome it makes for a far more rewarding experience alright final skill illusion this one's a tricky one since sarian didn't use much illusion i kept shorting it in favor of other magic skills when it came to perk investment and i'd opt for solving problems with destruction so illusion was pretty much never leveling as i said you'll usually be picking one or the other as in many cases illusion can be more of a hindrance than a boon for a destruction mage with that said illusion magic can be a ton of fun especially late game when you have levels perks and spells to make it do some really crazy crap it synergizes with conjuration and alteration very well and if you get yourself a strong follower and a couple of powerful summons you can just cause total chaos and sit back as your party does everything for you like in one instance i had my follower and a couple of resurrected drunker death lords battling with half a dungeon's worth of drugger upstairs as i went downstairs and ended up screwing around with the boss for a while until my companions finished business and came down to help the perk tree looks complicated but illusion has one of the most straightforward trees in the magic section 13 points to complete it tying it with restoration and enchanting unlike those skills though there are no multi-investment perks you got your standard branch of mastery perks all magic schools have dual casting off to the side we've seen enough of these we don't have to get further into it the other side forks with both branches leading to master of the mind which is an essential perk if you want to use illusion on undead daedra and dwemer automatons you're going to want to just fill both branches as all perks aside from quiet casting improve the effectiveness of certain spells on high level enemies and all quiet casting does is make it so your spells don't make any noise when cast letting you be sneaky smh it also makes all your shouts quiet which is strange but useful it's frankly a very boring tree overall with nothing in there aside from master of the mind to mix things up unlike say conjuration where you could get away with not investing in a branch here or there illusion mages really need to flush the whole tree out and that's a huge pain by level 58 i needed to use console commands to fill the tree out for testing purposes because even after farming allusion to power levels and character level ups and perk points i was still way short you can make up for a deficit of perks by brewing up a bunch of fortify illusion potions and duel casting all your spells but enchanted items will only decrease the cost of illusion spells still handy though if you want to just cast high level spells in lieu of getting perks you can also become a vampire they get a plus 25 buff to illusion magic strength the school has options for those getting into it but you're going to have to commit if you want to do what i was doing i'd go around hitting all enemies in a dungeon with a terror spell forcing them to run deeper into the dungeon where i'd get more and more of their allies until they were all cornered in a room then i'd hit them with an aoe fury spell and watch as the whole room erupted in pure chaos i'd then either put up an invisibility spell or i'd put on a fire cloak spell and buff it by using a powerful fortified destruction potion that increased the range of my cloak to encompass most of the room then i just sit back and watch and try not to get killed when someone targeted me illusion's got some fun effects and even if it takes some work to get the effect of level up the spells don't skimp elsewhere spells come in three flavors reminiscent of destruction missile area missile and aoe the area missile affects an area of 15 feet and the aoe hits 200 feet which is enough to turn half a dungeon crazy the aoes are master spells that are actually worth the effort to get and cast while the others are a mix of the remaining spell levels unlike destruction it pays to cast the highest spells because of the effect of levels and the fact that it's really difficult to know the level of the enemies you're fighting unless you've memorized what level a bandit marauder mage is first we got the three offensive types pacify fear and frenzy the terms are pretty much self-explanatory make enemies stop fighting make them run away and make them attack any one friend or foe alike but even if their names are descriptive the resulting behavior can have some strange consequences for instance calm spells will make enemies stop fighting but once your allies see the enemy is pacified they will stop fighting them too if the player attacks a calmed opponent the spell is removed and the enemy starts fighting again therefore the spell should only be used on opponents the player wants to ignore for a while if they want a spell to render an opponent defenseless so they can engage in a one-sided fight then fear spells are the way to go the problem is that fear makes enemies run away so the player and their allies will have to chase down the opponent as long as the spell is active attacking them won't break the spell so the only way to get the enemy to stop running away outside of waiting for the spell to wear off is a calm or a frenzy spell frenzy is a bit of a gamble it doesn't turn the enemy on just their allies it gets them to fight anyone around them so using this on a group of bandits could get them all to fight each other or it could result in them continuing to fight the player and their allies there's no guarantees for the spell though it does seem like it results in them shifting their aggro between targets every so often so even if they turn to fight the player they may just turn on their allies a couple seconds later especially in retaliation against an ally attacking them this spell can be used to turn normally passive npcs and creatures hostile but when i hit an elk with the spell it just ran up to another elk and started yelling at it so yeah use this spell at your own discretion illusion wow okay illusion also hosts a few buff spells that the player can put on their followers and summons courage and rally are pretty much the same except rally has a 15 foot effect radius they both buff stamina and health by 25 points and increase in npc's confidence value to increase their willingness to fight which didn't seem to work in boehner's case the master level 1 foregoes the confidence boost for buffing one hand two hand and marksman skills by 25 points which doesn't actually work on anything non-human without the unofficial patch i don't see these buffs as being particularly helpful but they can be used to get down opponents back into a fight though heal other works better and won't risk the companions dying if the effect wears off and their health is low enough muffle silences the player's footsteps and increases the effectiveness of sneaking the muffle effect has a magnitude like any other spell but this is hidden along with the noise value of a player's armor as a result the player will probably be unaware that the muffle enchantment on most items is only half the power of a muffled spell the latter of which applies a multiplier of zero to their armor noise value truly silencing their armor most players will know muffle as the spell they should spam if they want to boost their illusion skill this spell makes illusion the best magic school to power level especially if they want to farm perk points using the legendary skill feature clairvoyance just draws a visible route to the nearest quest marker fable 2 style it apparently just renders the pathfinding logic and a i would use to reach that quest marker i don't know i couldn't really come up with anything exciting to say about this spell it exists for players who can't navigate using just quest markers in a map and there you have it after an hour and a half we're done covering the mechanics of skyrim's magic system there's quite a bit more to it especially since i pretty much ignored anything added by dawnguard dragonborn and creation club i'll highlight some of those things later i just wanted to give as much context as i thought necessary for appreciating just how complex skyrim's magic system truly is for better and for worse nothing about it is straightforward and simple the college of winterhold is the leading authority on magic and skyrim with the disbandment of the mages guild after the oblivion crisis discontent towards magic grew in the empire mistrust for magic runs deeper in skyrim however especially following the calamity of the great collapse that destroyed the city of winterhold as a result few seek these services of the college and fewer still mean to join it this has resulted in the college becoming a lot more secluded roughly 80 years before the event of the game the city of winterhold was the capital of skyrim the ancient city said to have been built by archmage shalador who was also credited with building the college had always been a large city of wealth power and prestige that all changed when the sea of ghosts mysteriously turned hostile and battered the coastline of the city for a year until the cliffs collapsed and most of the city slipped into the sea while there was no proof or solid theories on why the collapse occurred people blamed the college because it had been spared the archmage of the college argued that the ancient magical wards put on the college when it had been built protected it during the storm he also hypothesized the collapse occurred due to the eruption of red mountain years earlier which had been so powerful that most of marwyn had been destroyed but the eruption had occurred over 100 years before the great collapse and ultimately the archmage had about as much evidence for his theory as those who blame the college this is the state of things when serene arrives in winterhold seeking entrance to the college the city of winterhold is a virtual ghost town forgotten and abandoned as solitude assumed the mantle of skyrim's capital city he finds ferralda at the end of the bridge leading to the college acting as gatekeeper she warns him that not just anyone is allowed to enter the college but being a celebrity in this province he figures he can impress the high elf lady after demonstrating a shout she recognizes the value he can provide the college and lets him through according to the uesp this isn't supposed to be an option to enter the college at this point telling feraldo your dragonborn is only supposed to be an option during the elder knowledge quest when we need to gain entrance to ask about an elder scroll but because i never came here for that quest and went straight to septimus it seems i was still able to use that dialogue option even though alduin had been defeated a while back i like the idea of getting into the college as dragonborn because it keeps the illusion alive that this place is actually as exclusive as it constantly lets on ordinarily we'd come up to this place and she'd give us the same speech and just ask us to cast a low level spell anyone if any class and skill level can cast not only that she will sell us the spell she wants to see for a discount if we don't know it for many players this completely shatters the idea that the college is an exclusive place only meant for those with skill and knowledge it'd be like if an ivy league school had an entrance exam that was just an open book fifth grade math test and they even had a cheat sheet for us to use if we couldn't even put one together ourselves when compared to the arcane university in oblivion which required us to get recommendations from all the guild halls the low entrance requirements for the mages college of winterhold makes them seem a bit desperate for new students i suppose you didn't have to pass any tests to join the mages guild itself but membership to the guild only meant being able to sleep there and getting access to some free stuff the real goods were locked in the arcane university and bear in mind the mages guild was founded on the idea of magic for the masses in comparison the college appears more welcoming than the guild which isn't supposed to be the case i guess just demonstrating a willingness to join the college with its tarnished reputation in skyrim is good enough for the admissions department what's also strange is once we gain entrance feraldo will never stand guard at the bridge playing gatekeeper again it's as if the college had been waiting for the player this whole time and with their arrival the need for bringing in new students has been satisfied but feraldo wasn't just standing there to welcome new recruits she was also keeping non-college members out but even without feraldo standing there non-college-affiliated npcs are never going to be seen on campus also if people can't access the college how are they supposed to make use of the services it supposedly offers skyrim even though we never saw it in oblivion it stated that the local guild halls for the mages guild acted as the primary point of interaction between the regular citizens and the guild here we're only told those looking to join the college are allowed inside so how are they getting anything done feraldo also has an interesting line where she says it's been too long since she's had contact with the greybeards makes me wonder what that actually means considering the graveyards are supposed to never make contact with the outside world and she being a high off non-dragonborn she wouldn't have been given access to high rothgar either we'll be dealing with for all day lot more when it comes time to becoming a master of destruction for now it's time to check out the campus while these services rendered for skyrim are more imaginative than anything else the services they provide for the player are more substantive every school of magic is represented here with a master of each residing at the college ready to provide training and sell any spell tomes related to their field the college also provides the play with some more mundane things like a place to sleep and store items places to enchant and brew potions plenty of free loot and plenty of magic related work for coin in the form of endless radiant quests the appearance of the college itself as a grand institution is like its claims of its importance conflicted master wizard mirabelle will show us around the campus as part of the orientation process and it has about as much impact as touring a studio apartment while skyrim improved the amount of detail performance it could squeeze out of its engine on old console hardware the college still ends up coming out quite puny we get the two two-story towers acting as dorms for the apprentice as senior members of the college and the main tower that houses the lecture hall the library and the archmage's quarters there's also the mid-in beneath the college where questionable experiments are done but aside from a couple of quests and the atronach forge not much will be taking us into its dungeon-like deaths the lack of any sort of classrooms labs or even a kitchen does not help sell this place as a self-sufficient college if they aren't going to have a bunch of local guild halls throughout the province the least they could have done was made the college a lot more impressive than its cyrodiila counterpart as it stands i think i prefer the arcane university especially if we take the ori into account i understand from a lore perspective the college ought to be a bit of a step down from the arcane university but with a step up in graphical fidelity i think most players would have been fine with the college being more detailed when mass effect 2 came out bioware took the opportunity to introduce a new normandy that actually had a logical setup with things like a kitchen and a bathroom and the players appreciated the new look even if the story bringing that ship into existence was shaky i believe players would have appreciated getting a college that actually felt like something like a college and not just a courtyard with a few skimpy towers surrounding it and an ice cave dungeon beneath it after our tour we get to attend our first and last class in the lecture hall we get introduced to tolfdir as well as our three fellow classmates who are apparently all newcomers to the school too i suppose they decided to close enrollment with the players showing up as an ominous sign of things to come this class will be held in permanent abeyance until the player decides to grace them with their presence so if you come just to talk to the librarians who locate an elder scroll don't worry when you show up six months later tulftur will insist they were still just getting started with sarian there told you begins lecturing everyone on the importance of magic safety after having seen everything he had over the course of the main quest to the dismay of his fellow students sarien had to agree safety is important to that end tolfdir insists on having everyone practice wards and there's something comically pedestrian about the game lecturing safety with a straight face after we abused the power of an elder scroll to slay the son of the god of time but yeah sure let's practice a ward spell and keep it up well i think this is an excellent start i'd like you all to continue practicing ah yes working as intended for those of you who might be wondering why i didn't just command hilda to move out the [ __ ] way i'll have you know you can't order pets around like you can an actual follower the goat completely understands when i tell it to wait at my house in the middle of a swamp but being told to move 10 paces to the left is beyond her capabilities apparently so followers have a bunch of things that can be ordered to do if you long press the activate key on them this can be used to order companions to go places fight things use objects and even steal things if they are morally bankrupt it's an often overlooked improvement to the follower system from oblivion and fallout 3. you can even use this function to safely pick up skill books without reading them if you want to save them to polish off a skill later seeing as pets can't do almost any of those things i guess they just lock the whole system out for pets instead of figuring out how to implement the move order speaking of pets with our class dismissed for the day we are free to chat with our three classmates and get to know them when i made that suggestion about the graveyards having an apprentice we could interact with i had these three lovely followers to be in mind each one has a unique background the boastful cat the self-conscious milk drinking nord and my personal favorite the televani waifu but we'll get back to talking about our classmates in serene's perpetual symphytis a little while later we got some ancient nord ruins to desecrate for the sake of progress we arrive at the excavated entrance to the ancient city of sarthal but no signs as to how the college actually got this thing uncovered we see a lot of equipment but no workers i guess they shipped us back to darkwater crossing after he was done up here the real problem isn't that we don't know how this place wasn't covered obviously the college could have just hired some laborers to dig it up the problem is that we never get an answer as to how the college discovered the location of the lost city to begin with it's fine for a story to let some question marks linger but we'll see when we get to putting everything we know about the story together that this question is a massive one that is conspicuously left unaddressed so what is sarthal and why is it important sarthol was the first nordic city in tamriel the city was attacked by skyrim's native snow elves in an event the nords would later call the knight of tears the legendary nordic hero yiskamor and his two sons were said to be the sole survivors of the attack which prompted his retreat to atmora where he gathered his 500 companions and came back to skyrim to seek vengeance upon the elves he allegedly took the city back and rebuilt it only for it to be abandoned years later during the marathik era even after it was abandoned the ruins were not forgotten centuries later it was still visible not yet buried beneath the snow and ice though judging by the presence of the draugr and burial crypts it seems sarthal was relegated as a burial site in its later years eventually it was buried and mostly forgotten aside from some obscure references and nordic legends interestingly back in the elder scrolls one arena players could visit this location but back then the fortress of ice occupied the spot on the map the fortress was just a multi-level dungeon not an ancient nordic city like it is in skyrim there are some people who read into this as some sort of lore relevant change but personally i think the fortress was just retconned and sartha was put in its place i wouldn't search for any deeper meaning into that change especially since there's no references to the old fortress anywhere in this game anyways the fact that the mages college a group already barely tolerated by the nords of skyrim managed to locate this ancient historic place and are now poking around in it is kind of a big deal we hear as much when our soyboy nord classmate ahmed voices his reservations against us desecrating the place guards and towns will also voice similar complaints when we finish the quest as prudish as the nords can be in regards to magic they happen to be right on the money with this one should we honestly be trusting someone like senile tolfdir with whatever is in here and if along the way my message about the dangers of magic should happen to sink in for a few students that would be a happy coincidence [Music] not two minutes into poking around in the ruins we run into trouble from disturbing things we don't understand we then have to equip this amulet and cast a spell at a spot in a wall to knock it down which is something i've never seen this engine do before or since it makes me wonder why this puzzle wasn't replicated a million times over like the rotating picture puzzles it certainly looks more visually interesting and we could have used any more puzzle variety possible even if it was just a rehash of this one half a dozen times we then get contacted by mage of the citric order who is able to freeze time and contrary version of himself to talk directly to us he warns us that we've done goof by coming in here and we have set off a chain of events that now cannot be stopped only we can prevent disaster to come when we tell mr safety about the impending danger he insists we break into the caskets around us to see if we can continue on ahead after all the best way to get a mage to do something is to tell them how dangerous that thing is and how they shouldn't do it fortunately the crypt has already been successfully desecrated enough to awaken oddman's ancestors so a drunker busts out of his casket and reveals the way deeper to the ruins after being ditched by tolfdir for a while and fighting much of undead we make it to a chamber housing two important things uric golderson and a giant magical ore the uric boss fight would have been a mechanically interesting boss fight if it wasn't so easy for decently leveled players he's immune to any damage for a few seconds until tolfier gets in place and starts draining energy from the orb that's sustaining europe once tultier starts we can lay waste to europe he can switch between three different defense spells that make him immune to one particular magic element at a time necessitating switching to one of the other two when he's in either fire or frost mode he will also be slightly weaker to the opposite element as a way to compensate for players not verse in all the skills i suppose but that's all info i pulled off the wiki because he dropped hard with just a few fireballs for me he drops his staff a fragment of an amulet and a writ of ceiling that specifies his incarceration in these ruins we'll be talking more about europe soon enough but first we gotta find out what the deal is with that citric monk and this giant orb unsure what to make of the orb toffee instructs serene to go back to the college and inform the archmage of the discovery once again saryan finds himself the errand boy of another faction as archmage savosarin tasks him with some [ __ ] work in the library while he gets the details from tolster on the way there he runs into ankano the thalmor advisor to the archmage who tries shaking saryan down for information considering he doesn't know anything he can't tell in kano much so he screws off and lets seren get back to work i get the introduction to encano is supposed to be unpleasant because he's meant to be an unpleasant person but the zavo's conversation has always rubbed me the wrong way i've never been able to get what sort of characterization they were going for with the archmage even in this conversation he goes between i can't be bothered to be involved with anything to why can't you give me any useful information to finally hey good job here's a reward i think a part of it has to do with his voice actor giving him this aloof and dismissive tone that i find grading but because npcs can't recognize tone of voice the other members of the college seem to love savos maybe it's because he permits so much at the college and keeps hands off that people respect him i don't really know and the more we get into his character as the quest line progresses the worse he appears anchano on the other hand is meant to be taken entirely at face value he's arrogant belittling nosy dismissive and admits he reports everything to his superiors nobody even knows why encano is at the college there's nothing in any treaty that mandates a thalmor representative b at the college he was given permission by savos so why is it the case then that savos ignores him and everyone hates and mistrusts him we never get an answer but between him and the woman at the thalmor embassy i get why many players cringe at the thought of the thalmor running the empire behind the scenes after dealing with those two we make it up to see the orc library in eric groshup who dares have some level of charm and personality in this cast of cardboard cutouts and as a result is one of the few memorable characters at the college he bluntly tells us we're kind of [ __ ] out of luck there's some books that might help with identifying the orb but some punk college dropouts stole them salvos knows about the missing books but favors a hands-off management style which unfortunately for us means a dungeon dive through an old necromancer infested dungeon while the mages guild questline in oblivion still has me scarred from doing so many necromancer dungeons this is thankfully the only one in the college's questline as well it's actually a pretty decent dungeon too there's a lot going on at the ruined fort with the mages doing all kinds of experiments that we can disrupt and use to our advantage in combat for instance there is one part where we can free a host of vampires they'd been experimenting on who take their newfound freedom as an opportunity to get a little payback we can also ambush some of the mages as they are training and when they are sleeping pretty much most of the encounters here have something to be exploited if we are looking hard enough or we can do the tried and true strategy of putting on a lightning cloak spell going ethereal and just standing next to them as we slowly drain their health and magicka and they are powerless to stop us we end up running into the deadbeat mage who stole the books bamboozled and imprisoned by the townies he was trying to impress once he's freed he will tag along and provide some support for the last rooms as the mages get thicker and trickier when we make it to the final room of the fort we run into the second boss fight of the quest line the caller she gives us some cheeky dialogue as she blusters and calls us zappos is lackey but in keeping with the theme of this quest actually being kinda decent we are given some options here we can try a speech check against the caller to get her to just hand over the books which isn't very hard to pass or we can outright attack her or try nabbing the books which also triggers the fight or i suppose we can take her up on her offer and just walk away or we can strike a bargain with her if that mage from downstairs has survived and is with us she will let us take the books in exchange for letting her keep the mage so she can use him as a test subject a very rare morally dark choice that leads to some pretty entertaining dialogue sirian goes for the sigma mail option which is to intimidate her into letting him take the books without a fight and then attacking her when her back is turned so she has no chance to defend herself if you decide to fight her honestly she appears to be another easy boss fight for higher level players she will use this teleporting spell to move around the chamber as she summons frost astronauts which can cause problems if you let them pile up if you press the attack early on her and stun her with impact you can end the fight pretty quickly her teleportation spell can do a lot of weird stuff though like letting her move out of a killcam animation even if you chop her head off leading to her going through the rest of the fight headless she can also bug out and become invulnerable which i've had happen on a previous play through a while back all in all they tried with her fight but it's still a mostly forgettable encounter that's main redeeming quality are the unique dialogue choices we get before the fight books in tow it's back to the college where the quest gives us one final blessing five skill books one for each school of magic deposited directly into our inventory so we can save them for later use whoever made this quest seems to have understood the strengths of the systems of skyrim and knew how to weave those elements into a solid magic focused dungeon quest honestly if the rest of the questline even maintained this level of above average quality i'd have a substantially better final opinion of the questline but as we will see going forward this quest line seems to have suffered from some time constraints and a lot of cuts hitting the books was an anomaly of invested care and time when we tell tolfdiy about the book knight of tears he's able to recall it and even the main point it makes that something was buried beneath sarthal that prompted the attack of the elves this has always struck me as a weird line because if toffee already knew about this book and what it references to why did we need to go on the hunt for the books i'm assuming the devs gave him this line so he would summarize the book for players who don't want to read it but it just retroactively makes the last quest seem pointless if tolfdir already knew all the information toltier then goes into some of the interesting properties of the orb he notes that the inscriptions on it match no known languages not even ones related to any lost races he also notes the thing is radiating magicka considering we saw it empowering yuric back in sarfall it's safe to assume this thing is magical in some sense but before we can get any more observations out of toltier we are interrupted by encano a monk from the citric order is here at the college asking to see saryan ankano tells us the order is a rogue organization that has clashed with the old mary dominion so the fact that one is here probably indicates they want the eye of magnus or something he demands sarin back channels anything the monk tells him which is wishful thinking on ankano's part up in the archmage's quarters we meet a different monk than the one that we saw in that vision at sarthal this one does the same freeze time thing though so we can at least speak to one another without anybody else hearing he assures us his order can be trusted despite what ankano has said and that they only wish to help prevent the disaster that they are sure is to come once again he speaks of this chain of events that had been triggered by us bumbling through sarthal but this time he's more specific and fingers the eye of magnus as the main cause of concern he confirms the object is immensely powerful in fact it's the reason they can't telepathically communicate with us anymore which is what forced him to come here in person his order fears the eye is going to be misused by others and that the world just isn't ready for the power to be unleashed therefore the player needs to do something about it the citrix don't normally get involved in things even him being here to deliver his message will probably stir controversy with some of his colleagues regardless coronier and some of the other monks believe they need to offer guidance in this case he believes our efforts should be focused on dealing with the aftermath of whatever is to come though they don't know what those events will be or what sort of preparation we should be making to that end he urges us to speak to the augur of dunleith a former student of the college who is now something different as he puts it he suspects the augur will have a better grasp of the events here than the citrix have and should be able to offer some more specific guidance he doesn't know where the augur is located only that he's probably somewhere on the campus and that we should speak to someone knowledgeable on the subject with that his spell breaks and he plays coy and walks off infuriating ankano and disappointing sapphos sarian then asks about the auger but savos gets very cagey and tells us not to listen to any of the stories tolter might be telling and to just drop the subject so naturally we go talk to see now tolfdir who spills it all that the auger was a student who well before twelfth year's time had an accident with a spell and fused himself with the energies that course to the college tolfdir is kind of friendly with the augur who can be located down in the midden genuinely intrigued now by everything that has been transpiring and tempted by the opportunity to uncover the power of the eye of magnus sarian heads down into the midden to meet this auger after waiting outside his door for about 10 seconds he acknowledges sarien's unswerving perseverance and grants him an audience revealing himself the auger turns out to most certainly be something different as he's a giant ball of light similar to the beams of magical light we see all over the campus he sounds like he's speaking in riddles as he explains to us that we are seeking what all mages are seeking knowledge but he warns us that knowledge can corrupt and lead to destruction and he fears that's what's going to happen with encano who also came down to the midden to probe the auger he tells us we will likely cross within kano in the future but we will need the staff of magnus in order to stare into the eye of magnus without being blinded we need to hurry if we want to prevent the disaster that is surely to come and of course he suggests haste so that we can prevent the disaster that is surely to come so it's back to the archmage who continues with the condescending attitude when we tell him we need to find the staff of magnus once we name drop the auger however his tune changes completely and he tells us it's important we find the staff even if he himself doesn't see the connection between the staff of magnus and the eye of magnus i would think the connection would be obvious but our next interaction might explain saavo's drawing of blank mirabel plays the cynic here and is unconvinced the orb is the eye of magnus and she's very uncomfortable with everything we've been discussing especially when we mention the auger she tells us this death is capable of storing large amounts of power but nobody has seen it in decades the only lead she can give us is a group of sin on mages up from cyrodiil who came around asking about the staff she's convinced they are trying to collect powerful artifacts but she's not sure about much else except that they were headed off to the dwemer ruins of mazoft so that's where we're off to next but before we get into analyzing the next dungeon quest let's get some background on what's going on here unlike the main quest the mages college does a decent job of priming the player on most of the lore necessary to get what's going on with its story but there's still some gaps let's start with the psijic order to put them into skyrim terms they're like the elven mage version of the greybeards they're one of the oldest and most exclusive organizations in tamriel dedicated to practicing what they call the old ways most recognize their old ways form of magic as mysticism which explains their abilities to do things like manipulate time communicate telepathically and even teleport most important to the plot their brand of mysticism allows for seeing into the future their abilities made them well suited to act as advisors for leaders in tamriel though their doctrine urges their monks not to get too attached or involved with the dealings of the world they appreciate change but believe it's important to guide change carefully to avoid what they consider bad change basically they seek change through influence as opposed to direct control as a result they are very secretive going so far as to poof their home island of atrium out of existence on two separate occasions throughout history in fact during the events of skyrim their island is still missing we don't know what they did during the oblivion crisis though we do know they beefed up their recruitment right before the crisis occurred likewise we don't know how they felt about the thalmar taking over the somerset isles but they're considered a rogue organization by the thalmor and they poofed their island just before the old married dominion started conquering so we can hazard some guesses so why would these citrix be so invested in the events of the college of winterhold that they'd not only get directly involved in things but go so far as to show up at the school in person as well how do they know so much about what's going on and why do they point out the auger of dunlain specifically the answer to the first question lies in the nature of the eye of magnus if we're to dismiss mirabelle's reservations and get on the hype train that this is what tolfdir says it is then that makes this object stupidly insanely powerful magnus was said to be the god of magic it's believed he was the architect of mundus the plane of existence nerd and tamriel existed and he provided lorkhan with these schematics to make the realm after getting cold feet for the project as it was killing the gods in the process magnus pieced on out of there tearing a hole in the fabric that separates mundus and aetherius the spirit realm beyond mundus this formed the sun and the many spirits that followed him toward their own holes forming these stars through these holes the power of aetherius can flow into mundus creating magicka the eye is said to be all sorts of things some believe it to be the literal eye of the god either left behind as a gift lost or stolen from him other theories state it's just a powerful artifact he used and once again others doubt its association with him at all likewise his staff is another artifact with a conflicting legacy but that at least has a proven extensive history on nirn and we'll get to talking more about the staff and its history in the next chapter when we go and retrieve it whatever the eye truly is everyone is in agreement that the thing is really powerful if it's as powerful as the citrix led on then that's a good enough reason for them to want the thing but what about the knight of tears how does that play to all of this according to the book a powerful artifact likely to be the eye was located there and that's why the elves attacked the city they wanted the artifact for themselves but the story doesn't quite match up if they wanted the eye and by historic accounts they managed to take the city leaving ysgramor and his sons as the only survivors why didn't they take the eye this question reveals a few possibilities either the elves wanted the thing but just couldn't retrieve it for some reason or they didn't want the orb or they just didn't want the nords to possess it considering the elves at the time were said to be advanced beyond what they ought to have been it's likely they were already delving into magic and artifacts similar to the eye i doubt they didn't covet the eye for themselves but due to the destruction of the city maybe being raised by ysgramor himself to keep the elves from getting the artifact they probably assumed the orb was lost when yiskamor returned with his companions he no doubt distracted the elves with a much bigger issue with his conquests and the nords were probably very careful to keep the orbs existence secret after it was rediscovered in the ruins the book knight of tears supposes the nords kept the things sealed away when they rebuilt the city but we can very clearly see when fighting uric that wasn't the case uric went to sarthal to claim the power of the orb for himself so it obviously wasn't being hidden that well i also suspect it had been used by the archmage shalador this would explain a lot of chaldra's accomplishments so maybe the nords were keeping the eye a carefully guarded secret but the thing was still accessible enough for those who knew about it regardless it was safely kept secret from the elves maybe they simply lost the ability to track it due to ischemor's wars or due to the eye being kept dormant most of the time the citrix managed to find it though and ankano might be onto something when he says they likely want the device for themselves what exactly that might mean we have no way of knowing considering how covert the organization is answering the questions of how do they know about it and how did they know the college would uncover it is pretty trivial when we consider they are steeped in the school of mysticism this only caused more questions though if they knew about it knew the college would find it and believe it's too powerful for the world to have access to why didn't they step in to prevent sarthal from being rediscovered it's the same case as the ancient elves either they wanted it but couldn't retrieve it or they just don't want others to get it and clearly the college is a poor group to be handling this thing we don't have all the evidence yet to draw any conclusions but i think it's pretty clear the citrix are probably not as trustworthy as they'd have us believe so now we come to the last big mystery here and that's what the [ __ ] is going on with the auger in the basement to answer this i'm going to be relying on a video camel works made explaining his theory on the auger of dunlain while i don't agree with all of his conclusions and i'm dubious about using eso to explain story events in skyrim i think he made some solid findings and most of his conclusions surrounding the augur as a character are right on target camel works video is worth a watch but i'm going to summarize some of his findings and conclusions here the auger was a student of the college back during the time of the great collapse and was likely the son of a hagriven mother which would explain his incredible grasp of restoration magic and strange magics nobody in the college could comprehend camel work states those magics were probably some weird unknown hedge magic but personally i think it was just an offshoot of mysticism as the reachmen are said to be adept in the school and it neatly gives us a connection to the citric order that will come into play in a bit while at the college the augur began obsessing over amassing power and this in one way or another brings us to the great collapse either the collapse occurred due to what the augur had been doing or some other event that the augur simply capitalized on it's not very clear but he was likely the source of the wards protecting the college during the event in the world of elder scrolls souls are sources of great power and if the auger was trying to do something like turn himself into an all-seeing immortal magical entity he'd need a large number of souls to achieve that so it's possible he triggered the collapse himself to harvest the souls to complete his transformation there's no direct evidence to support this but it's possible people at the college knew about this and already being blamed by the nords of winterholds for the collapse they'd want to keep this thing under wraps and this is why some of the higher-ups the college are super cagey about the augur however it happened either intentional or accidental the auger is now a big ball of light capable of seeing things others cannot nothing he says confirms he's able to see the future he might just be able to connect the dots using some crazy quadruple digit iq but whatever he's doing it managed to get him on the citrix's radar the fact that coronier refers us to the auger seems to indicate that the citrix and the auger have aligned motives or at the very least the auger will be a reliable tool for the player if the auger has motives of his own we're then left wondering what those could be again i'm going to yield two camel works here and agree that the auger likely wanted the ore brought back to the college and placed in the hall of elements the members of the college end up installing the orb into one of the magicka fountains at dot campus and if the augur is now fused with the energies that run through the campus then he likely has the potential to access the power of the eye and we can only guess at what a power hungry mage who might have committed an atrocity to ascend to a higher plane of existence would be able to do with a piece of the literal god of magic but going any further into the lore and backstory at this point is going to be getting ahead of the story so let's return to chronology and talk about m'zolft there's nothing worth discussing about the dungeon itself it's a bog standard dwemer ruin dungeon filled with constructs and falmer i guess we can appreciate the poetic irony of having to rely on the historic enemy of the ancient nords to guide us towards figuring out what to do with an object left behind by the ancient nords while killing the descendants of those who sacked sarthal when we get there we find a sin on mage and with his dying breath he tells us to find the other mages deeper in the ruins his journal talks about their mission to investigate the oculary in the ruins and the importance of some focusing crystal throughout the dungeon we continue to come across dead sin on mages until we get our hands on the focusing crystal and run into a lone surviving mage rather than expressing grief or remorse over the death of his colleagues he just recognizes the opportunity to steal all the credit for this expedition yeah these are the people who have replaced the mages guild and cereal frankly they seem like the perfect group to fill the void left behind by hannibal traven i've no doubt they will flourish for many years their plans to horde magical artifacts even though savos snubbed these synon mages when they showed up at the college decimus here figures he can let bygones be bygones and help us find what we are looking for in reality he is just trying to squeeze information out of us he takes us to the oculary where we install the crystal and then have to solve a simple puzzle to calibrate the device and get it to function properly this reveals a map of tamriel which shows two locations in skyrim this sets decimus off because the map is supposed to reveal the location of powerful artifacts all over tamriel as far as he can tell something in winterhold is causing interference and as a result only it and labyrinthine are being revealed this tips him off that we got something incredibly powerful in winterhold so sarian just outright tells him of the eye of magnus and asks if labyrinthine is where the staff of magnus would be desmos just goes uh yeah i guess but i'm reporting all this to my superiors so for the second time this quest line sarian lights someone up the moment they turn their back on him must have been the falmer i don't think this was how this part of the quest was meant to go down even if we play koi here the gig is completely up for the college as decimus figures out that we got something there as well desmis has absolutely no reason to help us and we have even fewer reasons to trust whatever he tells us and then there's the fact that this room seems tacked onto the dungeon and is reusing a lot of assets we'd already seen with the elder scroll reading device during the main quest this whole quest just screams rushed hack job to me and i suspect there were much bigger plans that just didn't pan out honestly the only thing worth discussing here is the synod themselves and how dumb they come across i mean the mages college was already pushing my ability to believe the reputation it was trying to peddle but the synod is shown to be cartoonishly incompetent their original crystal was warped from the cold of skyrim so they had to send a dude down to cereal to get another then they wandered into a dwemer ruin and got wrecked by the falmer and automatons and the lone survivor walks away from this completely empty-handed i know the takeaway is that the fall of the mages guild has left the empire weakened without any worthy magic organizations to fill the void but how the synod even exists as an organization beggars disbelief the cinna deals against another organization that we know even less about the college of whispers while the synod seems to be the test equivalent of the brotherhood of steel the college of whispers are meant to just be a group of daedra summoners and necromancers both of which are things the players themselves are capable of doing in skyrim now so take that information at whatever value you please the college of winterhold has been trying to remain neutral in these uncertain times despite both the synod and the college of whispers trying to curry favor with them to gain support for their own legitimacy it would have been interesting to see the synod and the college of whispers get involved in events once they caught wind of the eye of magnus but that's probably not even possible given how long it's supposed to take for news and people to travel in this world as it stands both organizations are pretty much unknowns in this game what exposure we get to the synod leaves us with a poor impression of it and it doesn't matter because once we leave the oculary they go back to being completely irrelevant for the rest of the game as sarian is leaving mizolft he's contacted by one of the sigix again the same one from sarthal telling him he's doing a good job but he needs to report back to the college immediately wasn't the eye keeping them from contacting us like this back at the college things have gone to hell we find sapphos and mirabelle locked out of the hall of elements where ankana was messing with the eye he managed to put up some sort of ward around the chamber but savos and mirabelle bring it down so we can confront the rogue agent an explosion occurs tossing us and mirabelle off to the side while savos is ejected from the building entirely killing him in the process it's difficult to feel anything at this point considering events are suddenly moving at breakneck speed and i hadn't been given a single moment to actually like savos but plenty of npcs appear to be distraught i guess watching the head of your college getting thrown out of a building would be somewhat disturbing whatever roncano is doing managed to spawn these weird magic anomalies all over the town of winterhold feraldo insists we go down to help and i gotta give it to arniel for bitching that the town wouldn't help the college if it was in trouble so why should we go help them yeah blow up a town and 80 years later flooded streets with magic sprites and sit back as what's left of the town gets wiped out it's that sort of grindset thinking that will get a mage far in life despite what arnielle thinks we gotta fight these anomalies and what a pain that turns out to be due to how the health of these things infinitely scale with a player's character level they don't have any sort of cap on their max hp a player at level 60 will fight anomalies that have 1300 hp each which is around the hp of a blood dragon and if you're playing at a higher difficulty your damage output is going to be reduced and they have no weaknesses to exploit basically fighting 10 of these things can be a nightmare fortunately we got a bunch of people to help in this fight but when we get to fighting these in radiant quests later on oh boy with the town cleansed of its anomaly infestation we report back to mirabel who is still taking a breather when we tell her the staff of magnus is over in labyrinthian she's weirded out because just before this incident savos had given her a key to the place with the instructions that she'd know what to do when the time came clearly that time is now so it's off to labyrinthine to retrieve the staff upon arrival we learn what savos's connection to this place is all about outside the front doors we see the ghosts of savos and a bunch of his fellow classmates from way back when savos was just a student of the college they decided to delve into the ruins and poke around to see if they could find lost treasure and knowledge figuring if they run into any trouble their combined magical prowess ought to be enough to keep them safe as we progress through the dungeon we watch their exciting little adventure turn into anything but as they get picked off one by one by the undead creatures of the place savos urges them to continue pressing on as the way back isn't any safer but deeper in another ghostly presence reveals itself a menacing disembodied voice that reverberates through the halls of the dungeon this voice taunts sarian confusing him for sapphos eventually realizing cyrene isn't savos but welcoming to a certain doom regardless making it to the end of the dungeon we find these spirits of two enthralled mages holding up a magical bubble keeping the dragon priest moroccan imprisoned after slaying the spirits moroccan is unchained and we are forced to slay him as well giving us his mask and the staff of magnus past that chamber we see savos's ghost alone in the hall apologizing to the two absent colleagues he'd sacrificed to keep morocco contained he promises to keep the entire place sealed away forever then at the very end of the dungeon we meet a random thalmor agent working for ankano who has come to try to assassinate us so as to prevent us from interfering with ankano's plans after slaying him too it's back to the college to put a stop to in kano alright let's get the discussion of the dungeon itself out of the way first it's okay it's an undead filled nordic dungeon so there's only so much variety we can expect the ruins themselves are of the ancient nordic city of bramjanar which was the capital of skyrim during the peak of the dragon cult days it was built to honor the dragons and its cult and was pretty much entirely abandoned after the dragon cult had been eradicated so the designers had to do something to make the place feel like an ancient capital they did this by creating a lot of visually striking chambers that would open up and make the place feel city-like we also come across some magic specific things like spell turrets rune traps and two unique doors that require casting fire and frost spells on them to unlock they also fill the place with a few unique undead creatures like these ghostly jogger and a couple of frost and fire spirits that emerge from those magic doors they also stuck an undead dragon near the entrance of the place which would be a more interesting boss fight if the chamber was actually set up properly for the fight and if the dragon wasn't so weak we end up fighting this thing in one of the largest interior cells i'd seen in this game well ignoring black reach and surrounded by weak skeletons the interior naturally keeps the dragon from being able to fly but it provides the player with no cover whatsoever to dodge the powerful frost breath of the dragon to compensate they only gave the dragon 500 hp and riddled it with all sorts of weaknesses such as weakness to fire and sunlight and even being susceptible to illusion spells though you need master of the mind because the creature is flagged undead it won't drop any dragon scales or give a dragon soul so it's clearly not an actual dragon just the reanimated corpse of one which is a cool concept that would have been worthy of some lore expansion but alas we won't be getting info on how this thing actually came to exist as we progress through the dungeon our magicka will periodically get drained down to zero whenever morocca taunts us this is a very annoying mechanic because it's completely unavoidable and happens right before large fights so the smart thing to do is stop dead in your tracks when he speaks and just wait for your magicka to recharge completely before continuing to walk sometimes that's not an option so you'll be entering a fight outnumbered with no magicka which is a really unfair advantage if you don't have potions to burn it would be like a warrior not being allowed to swing their sword for a minute at the start of a fight against four enemies it's just an awful mechanic that gets repeated throughout the whole dungeon the fight with morkai itself is okay i do like that he will really punish melee players because he's always got a lightning cloak spell active so running up and hitting him with a sword will lead to some bad times while most of this quest line was pretty agnostic towards players using magic or not this particular fight certainly favors the strengths of magic players just beware of his lightning storm spells because he can really mess you up he can also turn your summons against you so watch your flanks unfortunately he's still susceptible to staggering from impact so once i got a good position to hit him with firebolt it was basically over for him couple that would become ethereal which allowed me to ignore his worst attacks and i was able to bully him pretty hard with some low effort cheese which definitely sapped the fun of the fight for me the discount on kano fight at the end of the dungeon is also a weird inclusion i guess they wanted to make it seem like ankana wasn't completely passive towards the progress of the player the thing is we fight this random thal morgoon right after slaying an ancient dragon priest who was so menacing he could only be imprisoned for the past few thousand years it's hard to take the follow-up act of some random high of seriously he has the potential to be a tough fight especially in these tight quarters that would benefit him if he got his cloak and ward spells up but once again i have become ethereal and impact so he didn't really stand a chance all in all it's a decent dungeon that could filter some non-magic players a bit due to the variety of enemies and boss fights but for a mage player it's pretty dull the rewards for which are the staff of magnus and morochai's dragon priest mask the mask boosts magical regeneration 100 which would be pretty nice but it's classified as light armor so sarian can't wear it otherwise he'd lose all the benefits of the mage armor perks cool the staff of magnus is a pretty decent anti-mage staff if not lacking in imagination it has a really long range and will absorb 20 points of magicka per second from the target and once the target runs out of magika it will start absorbing health instead despite the huge amount of charges the staff has it only has a cast time of 47 seconds until it will be depleted not exactly what i'd expect from a staff said to be capable of storing tremendous amounts of power at the end of the day i expected a bit more out of the thing we'd been searching for for half the quest line when compared to other staves given to us as quest awards like the wabajak and the skull of corruption the staff of magnus demonstrates a lack of creativity with its effect sure magicka drain and lifesteal on one staff can be helpful but a couple of basic spell effects we can find elsewhere in the game just isn't very compelling the fact that half of its effects are geared towards the rarer magic enemy types also means it's not going to be seeing a whole lot of action something that's supposed to be as powerful as the staff belonging to the god of magic ought to be quite universally powerful and represent many aspects of the magic experience not just what would have been classified as restoration in the previous games but that about does it for analyzing the dungeon aspect of this quest let's talk the story for me saphos aaron was a completely unsympathetic unlikable character before discovering his big secret and after watching what happened during the expedition i found myself liking him even less i always thought his two associates he left behind and sealed away with morikai were enthralled by the dragon priest but that turns out not to be the case because they are actively keeping him imprisoned this means saavos must have been responsible for their fate as he apologizes at the end and swears to keep the place sealed away forever i have to wonder if he pulled a hannibal traven here and banned mysticism the same way traven banned necromancy i find it odd how the story of this questline revolves around a school of magic that no longer exists you have the citric order playing a direct and prominent role in this story who are known for being masters in the school then you got the auger who is probably another master of the school and uses it to make his predictions then you got savos whose entire section at the end revolves around ghosts and binding spirits to fuel a spell which is all textbook mysticism and yet not once do we hear someone utter the name of the school it all seems so deliberate it makes me feel like there's an anti-mysticism conspiracy in skyrim being peddled by the collagen savos to keep all their mysticism-related secrets under wraps i'm joking of course mysticism being removed from the game probably has no in-game reasoning especially since some of its spells were shifted to other schools i just think it's funny to imagine sapphos being so paranoid about his secret getting out that he gaslighted an entire province that a whole school of magic never existed but it does speak to the nature of his character in this story that such a wild theory wouldn't be out of line when looking at his character traits ignoring his sacrificing of his colleagues and never telling anyone about it he also lets the player go out on a wild goose chase to find the location of the staff when he already knew of its location savos gave mirabel the key to labyrinthine while we were out in resolved so what the hell did he forget moroccan was wielding the thing until after we'd left or were the sigix visiting him too and jogging his memory i just don't see any sort of leadership qualities that should inspire the loyalty he has given from his subordinates people seem rather upset after his death more so than mirabelles spoiler she dies off camera while we're away in labyrinthian so clearly he was liked by the other members of the college but i just don't see why and it's fine if i don't like the leader of the organization but the problem is i don't like anyone in the organization frankly i don't even see a reason for syrian to like or care about the college this part of the quest line was the opportunity to give us a reason to care about what's going on but it just seems to hinge on us seeing saphos as a tragic hero figure when he didn't do anything heroic literally the dude simply gives us the means to clean up his mess by this point the story had completely lost me which i guess is an improvement over the mages guild in oblivion where i was lost about two quests after arriving at the arcane university when we make it back to the college we find everything in a state of complete chaos tolfdir and some of the other mages were forced to retreat from the campus mirabella is dead and ancano has control of the eye in the school but we got the power of the staff which is able to cut through the ward giving us access to the college once again when i got this assignment i was hoping to be more gambling then it's time for the showdown with ankano this boss fight can go one of two ways it's either a genuine challenge or it's a total cakewalk i was so skeptical of my first recorded fight against him that i went back as i was writing this section to do the fight again just to make sure i was on expert difficulty as i should have been after getting filtered a few times i figured i must have been playing on a low difficulty at the time of recording the first attempt months ago but then i had the one successful fight and again ankana went down hard and fast so no my first attempt was correct the encounter fight just goes like this so after he finishes boasting about the power of the eye there's an explosion that will summon some magic anomalies the player has to use the staff on the eye until it's sealed shut again not gonna lie it took me some time to figure that part out using the staff on the eye doesn't have any immediate effects so i break off from hitting the eye to attack on kano only to find out he was still invulnerable ankano hits like a truck too he has some powerful destruction magic especially his chain lightning spells and he'll have a lightning cloak up most of the fight so getting up cloak is unadvised he also has a ton of magicka so you're unlikely to see him not casting spells though this does mean you can use the staff on him if your magicka is locked just keep enough juice to shut the eye if and when he pops it open again the magic anomalies can end up attacking ncano though keeping him distracted he also has a paralyzed spell though my followers in tolfdir seem to take those bullets for me once the eye is closed on kano is vulnerable to whatever type of cheese you want i naturally opted for the duocast firebolt variety which brought the fight to a quick conclusion to my surprise he doesn't drop any coil trinkets he simply has the standard thalmor attire which means ankana was actually kind of a badass definitely better than mouna marco and oblivion but he probably could have used a lot more hp to necessitate at least two or three eye closing cycles if you're quick you can take him out once you close it the first time even with onconogon the eye is still charged up and looking even more ominous than normal tolfdir has no idea what to do and that's when coroneer shows up and congratulates us the eye has grown unstable and he informs us if it stays here it will destroy the collagen possibly the world ankano's actions prove the world isn't ready for the eye so the citrix are kindly going to take it off our hands for safe keeping the other monk who's been stalking us via visions and a third show up and the three of them poof the eye in themselves out of existence tolfdir liking the suggestion from coroner that serene becomes the next archmage of the college confirms the promotion which he now has the authority to perform considering saphis and mirabellicon he gives sarian the robes and the key to the archmage's quarters and that's it the mages college comes to an abrupt end no reflection on the events that occurred no words of mourning for our fallen colleagues no thoughts for the future and definitely no explanation of what it even means to be archmage it's just a hard break so with all that we know all that's left to do is figure out what on earth any of this actually meant like i've been saying it's clear this quest line fell victim to cuts and probably a major reworking to get all the existing pieces to fit into something at least somewhat coherent this resulted in us getting a really short quest line that goes from zero to 100 after just two quests ends abruptly and leaves players scratching their heads wondering what they were even supposed to take away from all these jumbled events going back to the camel works auger of don lane video i think he did uncover a part of what the original story for the questline was going to be i'm tempted to believe it because the dark heart of skyrim story arc in eso seems to use a lot of what existed in the college of winterhold questline down to eso making their very own eye of magnus i suspect eso set out to tell the story that originally got cut but this is all stuff i'm getting from the uesp because i do not have time to play all those quests just to confirm my suspicions looking into those quests though it makes me more than a little sad thinking how a lot of the pieces were in skyrim for this quest line to be a solid cosmic horror type story about ancient powers tied to mysticism that's another thing with how much mysticism is featured in this questline it makes me wonder how late into skyrim's development it was decided mysticism was going to get cut it had to have been after pre-production because i doubt the writers and designers of the mages college would have devoted time to making a whole quest line centered around a school of magic that couldn't even be referred to by name anymore as it no longer exists but i don't want to dwell on what this quest line was originally planned to be i want to conclude what it actually is i really try to recontextualize the events to come up with some deeper read like i managed to do with the main quest but after seeing what they did with eso and just reading through so many pages on the uesp going through my notes and my footage and even replaying certain parts several times over i gotta call it this quest line is just incomplete there's a lot of problems here keeping this questline from having really any sort of satisfying and coherent narrative like it has events things happen but it just doesn't coalesce into a story that means anything aside from the player the only other active agent in the story is on kano and maybe the citrix but they didn't really take any decisive action until the end of the story nobody else at the college does anything just like how tolfi and our three classmates will wait until the end of time for us to show up for our first class everybody at the college will just wait until we do everything but why are we doing anything to begin with the citrix and the ogre assume we want to save the college but that's a big assumption when the college hasn't even given us any reason to care for it aside from the practical value it provides for training and spells who here is worth saving pretty much everyone is either an extreme backbiting narcissist or they are so aloof that they border on senile i guess that's why i like the librarian he just takes his job and his collection very seriously and i respect that but i'm not going through all of this just to save the [ __ ] library and how about that pursuit of knowledge and power that keeps popping up throughout the questline while that doesn't translate into any tangible power gains for the player aside from maybe the staff of magnus but we've already gone into how that isn't even a great trinket either what would have been cool is if the eye of magnus acted as some kind of source of skill gains for the player maybe like a trainer for any magic skill if the player's sacrificed soul gems to it or something then we'd have a practical reason to care about pursuing expanding the power of the eye and that would be a compelling reason to continue with the story of the questline as it stands the eye does nothing for the player and it's only time in the sun comes when we have to hit it with staff during the ancano fight maybe we could have been given the opportunity to call the citrix out for wanting to hoard the power of the eye for themselves maybe accuse them of letting the events that transpired occur even though they can see the future or accuse them of orchestrating the events so that ankana would misuse it so that they could claim the eye for themselves getting to fight three sigic monks at the end so that we could keep our skill trainer would have been a cool alternate ending to the quest line speaking of ankano i have to wonder how much of a role he was originally going to get because he probably is the least developed antagonist of this game he has no background aside from thalmor agent and his only motivations are so generic that he feels like he was inserted last minute to replace whatever bigger threats had been cut this would also explain why he's at the college even though nobody likes him listens to him and the thalmor aren't legally required to have a representative on the campus or maybe he and saavos were supposed to have a deeper relationship maybe the thalmor knew how he sacrificed his colleagues at labyrinthian or something i don't know ankano just feels incongruent to the rest of the story pieces we get but now i feel like i'm starting to talk in circles because that's what analyzing this questline ends up doing pieces are left dangling and threads tie back into one another in weird and incomplete ways so before you know it you're reading the uesp page on the great collapse for the fifth time forgetting what even led you to that page again this is because we don't get answers to a lot of the mysteries the questline introduced i mean the main quest didn't give us a whole lot of concrete explanations but the ambiguity was likely intentional and we at least have several solid theories we can construct to fill in the blanks with the college of winterhold we get nothing because we were given nothing it took the effort of someone like camel works to dig through the creation kit just to figure out the identity of the auger which gave us answers that straight up don't exist in the game and at the end of the day we gotta go off of what exists in the game and what's there is just a pile of events lacking context being made archmage was nice and all but serene went to the college to become a master mage he wasn't about to start doing whatever it was salvos had been pretending to do which meant it was time to buckle down and get grinding feeling a little sick of hanging around the college campus sarin decides it's time to investigate that forbidden legend and figure out what the deal was with euro golderson after finding the writ of ceiling and the amulet in the ruins of sarthal our quest marker punts us over to the college library where a book on a table gives us the scoop on this forbidden legend turns out uric was one of three sons who'd been hunted down slain and sealed away for all eternity for having murdered their father and going on rampages during the reign of king harold way back in the day their father had been a powerful mage in the court of king harold and while the book suggests he could have been murdered by the king himself a researcher whose notes we end up following later in the quest insists it was the sons who did the killing the reason being their father golder had a powerful amulet that in turn made him extremely powerful so the three sons murdered him in his sleep stole his amulet divided it among themselves and then went out pillaging skyrim as we know uric went to sarthal to gain possession of the eye of magnus while the other two were going around destroying villages and just being a general pain in the ass for the king so harold sent out his court mage who hunted the suns down slew them and seal them away forever as we follow the breadcrumb trail we end up fighting and slaying the lich forms of the other two brothers so clearly it wasn't the eye that turned yuric into a lich though he did use the eye to make himself invincible during our fight i guess then it was the amulets that were responsible for granting them life after death speaking of the amulet fragments all three are kind of garbage just granting plus 32 magika health and stamina respectively definitely not powerful enough for us to go around conquering skyrim my guess is that the amulets have lost a lot of their power over the past 4 000 years what with keeping their masters alive and all and likely their masters were already incredibly powerful before having the amulets plus do you really think bethesda would give us amulets as powerful as the legends state we'll see as we go forward just how weak the gear for mage players truly is indicating bethesda was never going to give us world shattering amulets the abilities of the three brothers are well demonstrated when we fight each one in their tombs uric we already saw with his ability to become immune to damage and throw down some spells mikrol is just a strong draugr wielding a leveled sword with an absorb health enchantment on it signus is the most interesting in that he's able to summon illusory copies of himself while he sits off on the side sniping us with arrows there's a bunch of ways to distinguish signus from his conjured copies but even if you can't tell the difference they usually die in one hit really the biggest challenge to his fight is for melee characters because he will constantly be teleporting around his chamber moving from one platform to the next a melee only character will have to spend a lot of time running around chasing the real version the three brothers appear again for an encore when we go to reforge the amulet at the burial tomb of their father placing all three pieces of the amulet on a pedestal in golder's tomb will summon the angry ghosts of his sons and we will have to battle the three of them again the fights for mikul and sigds go down pretty much the same but uric doesn't have the eye so his gimmick changes completely this version of uric is much easier and just teleports around the tomb and occasionally summoning astronauts to harass us with the three brothers of spirits slain the spirit of their father is able to manifest to banish his troublesome sons away forever he then combines the three amulet fragments back into its original form allowing his spirit to finally be at rest to the utter disappointment of sarian this amulet he just spent all this time trying to reforge turns out to be a total piece of crap it's literally just the three fragments fused back together so he will get plus 30 to his magicka health and stamina from one amulet being a mage that's just as worthless as the amulet uric dropped the forbidden legend quest is pretty alright even if the amulet is complete trash the boss fights are about as good as you're going to get in vanilla skyrim and the dungeons we gotta go into are pretty okay as well the devs worked in their usual puzzles but did occasionally work in some door puzzles that were successful and at least slowing me down a bit aside from the lame amulet my only other major complaint is that the quest markers spoil a lot of the fun of actually figuring out this legend we are very fortunate to have that dead researcher whose notes give us all the quest markers we need to go straight to our destinations i don't think blindly stumbling around skyrim looking for these specific dungeons would have been any better but maybe having clues in the dungeons themselves the legend and the researchers notes would have been more appropriate sarian hopes his next power hoarding scheme will be more fruitful than his pursuit of the gold or amulet after ditching the worthless amulet he sets out to start collecting all the fabled dragon priest masks that are said to be scattered around skyrim this ends up taking him right back into more ancient nordic ruins fortunately this hunt also allows him to collect more dragon shouts from the word walls that were usually located close to the ancient dragon priest he was hunting unfortunately for him collecting the masks turns out to be a waste of effort because each of the masks is classified as an armored helmet collecting the masks turned out to be more fun than i'd expected since the dragon priests can sometimes provide good combat challenge when i don't cheese them with impact and the dungeons they were attached to were usually pretty interesting the enchantments on the masks themselves are also usually pretty good and can be the centerpiece for specific types of characters but because they all have armor class types a mage using the mage armor perks and alteration can't use any of them even the one clearly aimed towards a destruction mage is classified as heavy armor i of course knew that when i started this considering i was using the uesp to track them all down because there's no way of finding their location in game aside from blindly going into every nordic ruin you come across but seeing as i'd never collected all the masks before i figured it would be a good way to cover a lot of ground to collect some dragon shouts and some footage i also had this neat stand in my not frost crack spire house for all the masks and it looked very sad being empty after clearing two whole quest lines dozens of dungeons and hunting down all sorts of mythical relics lost a time sarian still had nothing to show for it his best robes were still some garbage he'd bought from some vendor and white run the best gear he'd been rewarded was a couple of hand-me-downs from savos for being the college's [ __ ] he realized if he was going to have gear worthy of his status and abilities he'd need to make it himself [Music] so [Music] all right this is more like it boots with shock and fire resistance 46 robes with destruction and alteration cost reduction 20 along with 125 faster magical regen gloves with magika fortification 77 points and 50 easier lock picking because [ __ ] it why not an amulet with 25 restoration reduction and another 62 magicka a ring with 30 percent destruction cost reduction and 77 magicka regen and will be keeping zapos's mages circlet for its 70 matchka but it will end up being replaced by a custom circulate giving 68 points of magicka and 27 conjuration cost reduction because two enchants are better than one i also made a bunch of backup gear that makes spells from the different schools completely free to cast that will come in handy when it comes time to grind levels in each school it's disappointing that i have to resort to stacking custom enchantments on garbage clothing i found because skyrim simply lacks any sort of decent gear for mages gone are the days of the spell drinker amulet the spell turned cloak the mundane ring [ __ ] we even lost the ring of namira to cannibals even though skyrim added an incentive for players to go unarmored as mages they didn't bother to actually give us things to equip and just for some added salt they cut down the number of rings we can equip to just one for those unaware most people have 10 fingers eight of which can fit rings comfortably granted morrowind and oblivion limited players to just two rings which when you look at some of the rings those games had it makes sense we don't get access to anything nearly as powerful as those trinkets and now we can only equip one now that we're fully on the subject of equipment this seems like a good place to talk about staves in skyrim i pretty much never see people discussing them in their skyrim videos and that's because most of them are complete garbage destined to be vendored for a quick [ __ ] there were some solid ideas in their design but some really bad balancing decisions ensures you're going to be seeing a ton of completely useless staves popping up throughout your game i'd seen so many useless staves that i eventually developed a blindness towards them so that i'd automatically mentally filter them out of whatever loot i was digging through but there are some worthy staves to be found and eventually the ability to craft them was added to skyrim via the dragonborn dlc so at least skyrim had that over oblivion but skyrim did improve them in other ways too for starters they all look visually distinct based off the schools of magic they pertain to as opposed to being giant tree branches like an oblivion we can also dual wield them now which is questionable since we can't combine their effects or even use two of the same type dual cast but there's certainly potential opportunity to be found here while staves now react to players skill level and the appropriate magic schools by reducing the charge cost per cast they do not take into account anything else such as perks or enchantments on equipment this is a huge problem for staves because it means all the schools that require perks and skill levels to scale their spells like illusion get totally boned when cast by staves this results in illusion staves capping out at insanely low levels as well staves almost always use weaker versions of their namesake spells so a staff of vanquishment will only work on a creature up to level 12 as opposed to route space magnitude of 20. this ends up invalidating a lot of staves as a result pretty much all staves that banish reanimate fear frenzy pacify rally and turn undead end up being completely useless past early game then you got schools barely being represented here such as alteration which only gets two staves mage light and paralyze restoration has a couple of heal other staves that can come in handy for supporting followers but like i said all of its turn undead staves are a complete jump and wards aren't even available on staves this is a missed opportunity because while i feel like staves are okay for mage players they're really better suited for players who are not well versed in magic or looking to conserve magicka as a result a ward staff would be a great way to get players to mess with wards especially since it can be just off handed with a sword or destruction spell all in all staves are another one of those things i feel guilty for not messing around with more during a playthrough but unlike stuff like wards and runes there's plenty of reasons why i forget staves even exist it's a shame because a good destruction or conjuration staff can really turn a fight around and are excellent companion items for players who need magic for a dragon encounter but i won't judge if you just vendor all your staves because you always forget to whip them out in a fight speaking of forgetting to whip it out scrolls they still exist they managed to survive into skyrim but you still can't craft them though and that's about it they're okay to hang on to for the rare difficult encounter especially since they weigh almost nothing the high level ones like mass paralysis can be nice to have when you're in a jam and the high level destruction ones are about the only time i'd consider using high level destruction spells since they're free to cast off a scroll the last bit of gear related content to discuss is back at the college of winterhold in the midden the astronaut forge is a unique crafting altar the player can use to craft all sorts of items some of the items would be easier to acquire out in the game world rather than gathering all the ingredients needed to craft them in the forge such as spell tomes for conjuring basic astronauts other things like being able to make randomly enchanted and unenchanted daedric weapons and armor can be extremely useful and profitable there's only so many items that you can make with a forge but the recipes do follow a certain logic so you can technically experiment to figure out what you need but there's also recipes that can be found out in the wild i just refer to lice online because some of the best items require some very rare and expensive ingredients i wouldn't want to be wasting the forge also lets you summon some hostile enemies which can be farmed for xp or souls though it's not a very efficient way of doing so ultimately the forge is more a novelty than anything else but it does introduce ways of acquiring certain things really early into a play through some of the best recipes requires a sigil stone to be installed into the forge which can only be acquired at level 90 conjuration during the master conjuration quest of the college but we'll talk more about that later in requiring the essential stone we do have some limitations on the forge but it's nothing a little dedication can't work around with the gear situation rectified it's time to expand serene's spells and skills now i could sit here and detail all the cheese tactics i use to grind these skills and how i abuse the fact that skilled trainers of the college are also vendors so you can get your money back by selling them bankruptcy items after training but i don't really feel like going through all of that instead i'll just say that grinding skills in skyrim is a lot less necessary than it was in oblivion most of the skills aren't nearly as unbearably slow to level and certain skills like alteration will actually level from just having something like shield spells active while in combat the only skills i truly felt compelled to power level were restoration and illusion the former because it's still levels slower than the other schools though nothing compared to what it was like in oblivion and the latter because i just wasn't using illusion spells that school actually levels pretty damn quickly if you're actively using the spells frequently alchemy can lag if you're using it to just make usable potions that are going to have normal gold values but if you decide to break the skill to make quick money it's going to level extremely quickly i think alchemy would have benefited from having some kind of minimum and maximum xp values placed in potions they seem to have figured out enchanting's xp curve so i'm not sure why alchemy was sought of whack in comparison if you're watching you might be wondering why i stopped at 95 for each skill rather than capping them all out when we get to doing hermeas morris quest and use the agma infinium that will be addressed but now it's time to tackle all the master skill quests so sarian can fill out his spellbook completely this began the most cursed luck i've ever had with this game as three of the five quests suffered from catastrophic complications that got in the way of completing them for a while first up was illusion dreffus nellerin tasks us with using an illusion spell he gives us to locate four master illusion texts scattered throughout the college casting the spell allows them to be seen for 30 seconds then the spell wears off when the books disappear requiring the spell to be cast again no quest markers but the books are all located in fixed spots one book per major part of the school so it shouldn't be too big a deal trying to find them right well things were going fine finding the first three but then i got to the hall of countenance and got stuck by this point i resorted to using a guide because time is valuable disk space when recording but i still couldn't find the book it's supposed to be on this barrel but it wasn't there the uesp suggests looking in the general area if a book is missing because they can sometimes be thrown around by casting spells near them before the quest starts eventually i used freecam to look around the barrels and that's when i saw that it had fallen behind the barrels where i'd never be able to see it normally so i'd jump behind the barrels grab the book and complete the quest next up was destruction siren had gotten over his sweaty palm syndrome when dealing with ferralda during his destruction training after he realized how much of an ankle biter for all that turned out to be once sarin had become archmage so asking her about master training was pretty easy she told him there were stories of secret powers and spells out there that people could master her own searches turned up a book but she doesn't know much more so she just hands us over the book reading and understanding it turns out to be the real challenge here as it's written in poems and is a scavenger hunt to boot i'm bad enough at navigating by plainly written directions never mind poetry and this would also require either having a lot of the map explored or just having really good knowledge of skyrim geography so this was a job for the uesp again i eventually made it to the first bower of the book described and eventually figured out to put the book on the pedestal but then i forgot to cast this spell on the pedestal of the book on it and just travel to the next location so it should come as no surprise that after i fought through a whole dungeon to get to the second pedestal i didn't have the book with me eventually i realized the error of my ways and went back to retrieve the book except i still hadn't cast a fire spell on the book at the first location so when i got back to the second pedestal i still couldn't do anything with it eventually i figured out what the deal was went back to the first pedestal and went through all three to complete the book properly okay i might have been a little lacking here but i was utterly convinced this quest was bugged same as the last and skyrim can have this effect of making its players really dumb by convincing them to turn their brains off so when it throws something like this in that actually requires a little thought and knowledge the knotted out skyrim player might just get completely blindsided then again i am the guy who forgot to bring the crusader relics to fight umaril so you know missing the point isn't exactly a new thing for me anyways siren reads the book and gets the firestorm spell with the other two storm spell tomes mysteriously landing in feraldo's inventory even though the book stumped her and is why she gave it to serene the third cursed quest absolutely was my fault though finnish jester wants a sigil stone if this was oblivion this would be a trivial task but martin sacrificed himself to deny us the power of sigil stones and skyrim so we have to summon an unbound dramura to fetch one for us the dramora isn't going to listen to us so we'll have to do some [ __ ] to get it to yield to our will basically we just gotta kick it around until it falls in line simple phineas even set up a little place for us to perform the summoning problem was every time i summoned him this happened is eventually i realized he was going after hilda which didn't surprise me in the slightest hilda had a way of breaking a lot of things in skyrim and she had particular trouble on the college campus this has to do with her lacking certain faction flags which makes her literally trigger a lot of npcs you need to leave you need to leave it's time for you to go you need to leave i'm sure you've made note of who's been the most helpful during your time here archmage it's time for you to go you need to leave you need to leave restoration is a perfectly valid i warned you i'd be bringing up the pet's creation a lot this thing is seriously a mess so i told all my followers to wait downstairs while i dealt with the summoning ritual this time he just stood there after i taunted him and he ended dialogue as opposed to fighting me once the dialogue ended this wasn't a big deal i just had to attack him a bit until he retaliated but you know just another bug in this quest that seems so simple after killing him a few times he finally submitted and went off to fetch me a sigilstone i was expecting him not to come back but he actually did in fact he was so delighted to do my bidding that he never shut up about that it's it your sacrum stone lord dagon is less than pleased that it's lost your satan stone lord dagon is less than pleased that its loss your satan stole lord dagon is less than pleased that it's lost your sacral stone lord taken is less than pleased at its loss there are few places where one can pursue my type of work mine oh no the stone is yours i simply need to borrow it for a moment now let's see what there is to see next up is the restoration quest this was the only one that actually proceeded correctly from start to finish colette tells us to go seek out the auger again as he's the true restoration master at the college down in the midden he tells us we will be tested survive the test and we will be rewarded with what he knows no need to bother explaining what happens if we fail fortunately the test is really simple stand there and heal through all the weak ass damage if you summon ghosts lay on us for a few seconds until the augur is convinced probably the easiest of all the master requests no wonder nobody respects restoration matching around here finally we got alteration tolfdir needs some dragon scales to finish a spell he's been working on but not just any dragon scales he needs heart scales what's the difference no idea but getting them requires a really sharp knife tolfdir has learned of the location of a sacrificial dagger the dragon priests use that would do the trick this is the only raiding quest in this bunch so the dagger can spawn in a random dungeon in skyrim and any dragon out in the wild will work for harvesting i was really confused when the quest marker directed me to not frost craig spire but learning to trust the all-knowing marker i did as it said following it to one of my display racks where i already had the knife on display thing is you can come across this knife out on your travels even before you have the quest active because it's going to be located on a random dragon priest in the game world seeing as i already killed all of them for their masks i picked the dagger up at some point and put it on display my house because hey it's a unique item glad i didn't sell it with the dagger all we had to do was locate a random dragon dragon peaks are good for this sort of work slay it and then activate the corpse with the dagger equipped then it's back to tophia for a free copy of the dragon hide shield spell this spell is actually pretty neat in that it will nullify 80 of all physical damage for 30 seconds it will also stack with armor rating from any armor equipped so a battle mage could get some good mileage with this thing and basically make themselves nearly invulnerable as well the duration increases with stability and alteration fortification effects but it's unaffected by the main drama perks weirdly this is the only mastery quest that requires the player to have progressed through enough of the main story to spawn random dragons in the world as well the dragon at the watch tower isn't enough the knife won't work on it it has to be any dragon slain after that with all the master spells acquired that pretty much completed saren's spell book with vanilla spells anyhow this just leaves the vanilla dragon shouts i thought about going through and trying to collect all of them but there's a bunch that are gated behind the other guild questlines i wasn't going to be doing with sirian and really collecting all the words of all the shouts wouldn't help contribute to the discussion about them so i passed on that errand but we still haven't really talked about shouts so let's do that a few general gripes with the shout system start things off all shouts work off of a single universal cooldown so if you use dragonren to take down a dragon you can't use any other shouts until the cooldown ends for dragon run the specific shout and what level the shot was cast at will determine how long the cooldown lasts the shortest cooldown is 5 seconds with the longest being 600 for the third level of crawl storm while knowing how to balance using shouts does introduce some level of skill to using them the lack of accurate feedback for things like how much cooldown is left means that shouts can't really be relied upon this would be fine if a lot of the shouts were super powerful game changers that really should only be used once or twice in a fight but that's just not the case in most cases shouts are either weaker than their spell equivalents like the shouts for fear and calm enemies or they are just barely more powerful at their third level as is the case with fire breath there's no way to scale the damage from these shouts and perks will not affect them so all my points in the fire magic perks will have no effect on the fire breath shout making the shout worthless in comparison to my fire magic and that's one of my biggest problems a lot of the shouts have to contend with for magic players any shots that are redundant for magic users end up being grossly outclassed this is why i ended up abusing shouts like become ethereal because i had no magic equivalent for those shouts and they were extremely powerful in their own rights and just like how there's no way to scale shout damage there's very few ways to reduce shout cooldowns especially in vanilla skyrim where the only things that will reduce shouts are blessings related to talos so what shouts did i find myself using as a mage not many dragon rend definitely got the most mileage for obvious reasons become ethereal was probably my second because it let me walk through a lot of fights and reposition which is always a huge advantage as a mage i would have used slow time instead but two of those words are quest locked and you get become ethereal early on in the main quest both shouts really have such a profound impact on combat that you ought to not use them that much as a mage i'd suggest relying on whirlwind sprint if you want to reposition because it requires more skill to fire off correctly and won't make you immune to literally everything for such a long period of time call dragon is sometimes useful for distracting enemies and fighting other dragons odaving can do some decent damage if he decides to focus on an enemy but he has a serious attention deficit problem and is just as likely to fly off and kill some wolves on the other side of a mountain as he is to attack the thing that is actively killing you as well he will often just do strafe attacks which won't do a whole lot it's also a 300 second cooldown which is pretty long for an ally that will fly off once the fighting ends call valor on the other hand is a decent summon shout each word will spawn one of the three nordic heroes we fought alduin with each hero has their own weapon and shouts they come with and they will remain on the field permanently until they are slain just beware of using them with conjuration spells because they can override a summoned creature and likewise they can be dismissed by another summon and then of course we got unrelenting force for a mage this is an indispensable shell i mean it's pretty much universally useful for any sort of character but it's great for a mage if enemies are getting too close and the player needs some space to move for me it was mostly used for throwing people off cliffs as todd intended it's probably my favorite show it's well balanced useful in many situations for so many different purposes and it's just fun to use we'll be talking more about shouts in future videos these were just the ones i found myself using with sirian i imagine i'll be getting more mileage out of shouts with melee and stealth characters just because of all the overlap we got between shouts and magic sarian might be a master class wizard now but there's still quite a bit of content left at the college we're going to go through these rapid fire because there's a lot of them and frankly they aren't very interesting first up we got brelena the dunmer student from marwind who turns out to be a lot nicer than she might initially come off before and during the sarthal quest she asks us if we will help her practice some spells she'd been working on because she'd rather not have to ask desargo i don't know you could ask godman he seems pretty domesticated but yeah sure [ __ ] my [ __ ] up fam this quest is as easy as they come the first spellback fires forcing us to wait around for a few in-game hours for it to wear off then it's back again where her spells backfire some more and turn us into a bunch of different animals until we're finally put back to normal and we both agree to just never talk about it again surprisingly this quest rewards us with a decent level necklace of magic resistance i say surprisingly because the next two quests don't reward [ __ ] even though they are much more involved i guess brelina just has rich parents so she can afford to pay us for our work who doesn't have rich parents is onment who sounds like he almost got disowned for wanting to study magic at the mages college in a fit of angst he sold his family necklace to the shady goods vendor on campus for something but now he regrets it and wants us to get it back he's not actually going to give us anything for doing this except his everlasting gratitude and friendship and he won't even tell us what he bought from enther but today is his lucky day ordinarily sarian wouldn't help someone who up front told him he won't be getting anything for his effort but serene is in a completionist move so he agrees to talk to anthony anthir is amused the spineless nord sent another student to confront him because he was too scared to confront enter himself he's willing to turn the necklace over though if we fetch a staff from him from someone he regrets pounding it off to once more onman finds himself on the fortunate end of saren's generosity as he does retrieve the staff from a hostile mage at the end of a dungeon the staff in question was a grand step of charming which i thought was just a randomly generated item because why would engier be so afraid of some random mage possessing a staff that charms it to level 12 but no this item was just set by the quest designer i could understand giving the mage a really powerful destruction staff but really the step of charming is what we're going with turns out there's more to this than meets the eye but we'll get back to that in just a minute for now trade the staff get the amulet return the amulet finish the quest gizargo wants us to test some scrolls he's been working on and all right now i'm starting to get jealous so far we've helped two people with spells they've made and now we're helping someone test custom scrolls who do i gotta grease up to get access to any of that he gives us a bunch of scrolls for a custom flame cloak spell and i ended up using them during the fight with the undead dragon at labyrinthian which was probably a mistake because the cloak causes an explosion on each undead enemy it encounters this explosion will hurt you just as much as it hurts your enemies and it will stack with more enemies it detonates off of needless to say i was doing a lot of healing that fight but the scroll only lasts 30 seconds back at the college i tell him his scrolls are scuffed and he kindly lets us keep the worthless scrolls as a reward gee thanks bud he does end up becoming a follower like the other two students after this and if you aren't playing with the unofficial patch disarro turns out to be one of the best followers in the game because he has no level cap so he will continue to scale with a player unlike pretty much every other follower in the game there's a chance he knew what those squirrels would do and was actually trying to get us killed but i mean look at that face how how can you not trust that face totally innocent next up we got arnelle gaines project which is a sufficiently lengthy quest of chains quest of chains yes yes next up we got arnold gaines project which is a sufficiently lengthy chain of quests there aren't many side quests that get their own chains the potama quest the force one conspiracy the white file blood on the ice and this one are the only ones that come to mind those quests use their run time to tell a deeper story that use the gaps between their quests to indicate a passage of time to explain the new developments the gaps between arniel's quests are just meant to imply he's working behind the scenes on his experiment which i honestly kind of wish more quests did just to avoid the immersion breaking moments where we turned something in only for them to turn around and give us the next steps immediately unfortunately our role in this quest is that of lab assistant which for arniel just means retrieving items the first part is quite simple retrieve 10 drummer cogs dwemer cogs are just random junk items that can be found all over dwemer ruins i got my tent from result while i was doing that quest just beware these cogs are heavy weighing in at 10 pounds each i just made hill to carry them with his cogs we gotta wait a few days for arnielle to tinker on his project afterwards we asked him what he needs and he sends us off to enthear who is apparently holding out on him and third tells us that he has the item but he still hasn't received payment so he's not giving it up why arnel didn't just tell us about this i have no idea but now we got to do another fetching delivery for enther and guess what he wants another goddamn staff from another nondescript boss magenta dungeon what's even more strange is that it's another grand staff of charming although this one at least has a unique name and a destruction staff model even though it's an illusion staff i'm curious if this was originally planned to be the same staff from onman's quest but they decided to separate them so we wouldn't have to do this quest before doing onmen's requests the story goes and thier has a friend who wants to staff which he admits isn't even a dangerous staff hinting at its aspect of charming but he needs us to acquire it from a hostile enemy in a dungeon he doesn't explain how he knows where to get this staff but this is enthier his whole role at the college is finding crap people need no matter how rare or obscure we do it give him the staff and get the warped soul gem for arnie's experiment i like anthea's role at the college and as much as doing his fetch quests can be a bit tedious and annoying that makes me like him just a bit more here's the thing anther is a straight-up hustler he's got a serious business here at the college dealing in black market goods and almost everyone has to deal with him at some point he's a lot like the shadow broker damn twice in one video he's got his game everyone has to play and he's not going anywhere i think this staff was an opportunity to give enther his own unmarked quest chain where we just deal with this stupid step so rather than making arnold and ahmed's quest deal with separate staves make them the same step structure it like this every time someone at the college has a part of their quest that involves us going to enthea we get the next stage of end theirs unmarked quest so regardless of whether we do onman's request first or one of two of arniel's nth requests spoiler releasing and dear again on arnie's behalf and there will give us the task of retrieving the staff of tandel next time we gotta deal with him again he says uh yeah bro that guy i sold the staff to real shady guy you gotta go get it back for me now part three might be something like the staff got stolen from enther and we gotta locate it from a fence into town something like a throwback to that quest from oblivion the fourth and final quest would have us delivering it to some other hapless four who we can only assume and fear will one day steal the staff off of in the future i'm imagining this staff being a burdensome macguffin pulp fiction briefcase style it's a shame we don't have burden in this game because making this a staff of burden would have made it even more entertaining the point is seeing as we're already doing these retrieval chores for these other quests why not go in and make the chores their own story it would give enthear more of a role in the college give us greater insight into just how shrewd he is and i think it would make for a funny memorable and unique series of quests that add interesting context for these sorts of quests we've seen a million times in these games not every quest needs to be about a grand adventure gripping intrigue and mysterious mysteries sometimes [ __ ] just needs to get done but with some careful setup and some clever dialogue bethesda could create context for these quests that make them something special speaking of something special or neil has hit a snag with his device and blew it up now he needs us to take this warped soul gem to some dwemer ruins and find these little devices that will allow us to charge the gem this requires us to physically put the gem in the containers like we would an item in a chest and then cast a special fire spell on it this charges the gem up a bit but destroys the container in the process so we gotta go around to a bunch of locations marked on our map where we can find these containers once that's done it's back to arniel for the final quest i found this quest extremely interesting only in that it shows that the engine is capable of some pretty unique stuff we see here the game can recognize the specific item was placed in the specific container and that the container was hit with a specific spell we've seen magic affecting a lot of static objects in this game and it makes me wonder why something like this wasn't used in designing more puzzles or say letting us cast spells on locked chests and breaking them open clearly someone took the time to program this functionality into the engine why not utilize it more my guess is it requires a lot of weird scripting that not every quest and dungeon designer is going to know how to do and this being bethesda they don't have people whose sole job it is to implement these things consistently throughout the game so we get a quest like arniels and dev or part 3 where we see this unique mechanic that will never show up anywhere else again despite its potential alright last part marniell needs us to get another item from anther this time enthea is the one coming up short arnold already paid for nthere to set up transporting the item from morrowind but the courier carrying it never arrived something about this whole part of this quest is really off and i'm not talking about bugs i mean it seems like there's some cut or missing content here if you listen closely you'll notice anther's voice changes indicating his last few lines were recorded on another day which usually means the voice actor is doing some pickup lines because the dialogue was rewritten from the original conversation he voiced previously it was a simple task so i didn't keep close tabs on it like i do with the dangerous stuff last i'd heard he was crossing the border from morrowind into the rift if you're getting involved in this that would be where you'd start looking why is this suddenly so important anyway whether it was the first part of the conversation that was altered or the second part i don't really know but as well anthea asks why is this suddenly so important which is a weird question to ask considering it's only natural arnold would be following up on the delivery as he already paid for it and needs the item for his lengthy complicated experiment there's also no follow-up to that line we don't have any dialogue options we can tell him and he doesn't have anything else to add conversation just ends what's even more strange is that nthir made this huge deal about not knowing where this courier is yet when we check the map the courier is highlighted with a big old quest marker we get plenty of weird quest markers for locations the pc should absolutely not know about given what we've seen but we've never gotten that after a two minute conversation from an npc explaining that he doesn't know where said location is normally i'd say this is just bethesda being bethesda but with everything else we just saw i get the feeling this is a last minute compromise because this quest didn't have time to be completed properly so after sirian divides the exact location of the courtyard based off of enthea's vague directions of it was coming from marwinden to the rift we make it to darkwater crossing for the second time this playthrough i find it funny how the game had all of these locations you could pick from to place the courier's body in most of them i've never even uncovered on the map let alone explored but the radiant system decided to drop him into a place i'd already cleared a while ago so with the dungeon now level up to the low level i was when i first came here rather than getting filtered hard by all the falmer i got to stop them and got to the korea's body in a couple of minutes for whatever reason the courtier is stripped naked except for the one-of-a-kind keening when i first saw this i assumed the courier must have wandered in here the last time i was in here and got killed and the system just spawned the dagger in his inventory but when i checked my footage i didn't see the courier so i developed the mandela effect because after that point i could have sworn i'd seen him wander in here and get killed in the middle of a fight between me and the boss of the dungeon but after searching through all the footage no that never happened i've just developed a psychosis from all the times that actually did happen and this is what skyrim does to you if you play for too long you start to expect the madness and get confused when it's not there never figuring out why the courier was stripped by the falmer or what the quarry was even doing in dark water crossing it's back to arniel to explain a much simpler mystery with keaning which we are able to handle freely even though marwin had a whole thing where the player needs to get special gauntlets to handle it maybe retrieving wraithguard was the cut content from this question arniel is finally ready to perform his experiment he figures if he can recreate the conditions at the time the dormer disappeared he can figure out what happened to them lacking lorkhan's heart he uses that warped soul gem instead and starts going to town on it with keanu and wouldn't you know it after a few good whacks arnel vanishes leaving the worthless dagger and the warped soldier behind in the process pretty much confirming what made the dwemer disappear although arnold isn't quite gone like the dwemer through this we get a spell that will let us summon the ghost of arniel meanwhile even the dwemer's as ghosts can't reach nirn wherever they ended up so maybe arnel didn't figure it out as well his ghost makes undead sounds which could be an oversight or it could mean he's not having a good time wherever he ended up you want something from me while arnel is off in some realm of oblivion shoveling the [ __ ] of more like ball let's talk about this dramora pirate we can come across in the basement of the college while running around in the midden we can come across a room where clearly some sort of summoning ritual went wrong there is bones and all blood all over the place and a daedric gauntlet in the middle of a shrine we can find a report on the incident that details some students got blasted when their summoning ritual failed there is also a key that will unlock a chest in the library containing four rings why these are being stored in the library and why they're flagged as owned property so it'll be considered stealing when we take them is never explained what's also not explained is what to do with the rings if we go back to the gauntlet shrine though you can activate it and place the rings on each finger there's no rhyme or reason for which one goes on which finger it's just trial and error and you see i told you a hand can fit four rings comfortably once we get the right combination we get some weird spelling dramora dressed like a pirate shows up wondering why he just got yanked off his ship he eventually figures it out and tells us how he'd been summoned by the weak students and so he obliterated them and took off to live a life as a pirate which is a pretty interesting origin story for a pirate captain i will admit he offers us a bargain verbally free him from his bondage so he can no longer be summoned by this stupid shrine and he will give us the location of some treasure he hid in skyrim liking the idea of free treasure for just saying a few words serene agrees and frees a dramora pirate which is probably going to cause a lot of suffering for a lot of people but hey free treasure the map he gives us is really hard to make out and i don't mean it's cryptic i mean i was struggling to even see the details you of course know what i did to find this thing but even the uesp wasn't enough for my intellect and it took me a few more minutes to successfully locate the chest fortunately the thing is magical so when you get close it summons into existence with a big flash and a lot of noise so you shouldn't miss it it wasn't a whole lot of treasure but hey gold bars and some gems you know what i like to do with those while i was wandering around looking for the chest i stumbled upon the corpse of a woman burned to a crisp with a flame cloaked spelt home in front of her presumably she was a mage trying to use the spell and it backfired on her with how many backfiring spells we see in this game you'd think skyrim would have brought back spellcast chance anyways this woman was a student at the college she was one of four students belonging to the class prior to our own hitting up phineas he tells us how they all mysteriously vanished at least a month ago though he's not sure why because none of them were working on anything terribly dangerous as far as he was concerned we can go around exploring the frozen wastes of winterhold and find the bodies of all four students and evidence of the fates that befell them each one of them has a unique item confirming the identity of each body but the items don't do anything this is one of the cut quests of the college you can collect all the items but they don't do anything we would have been able to bring them back to phineas to tell him of their fates but that never made it into the final game the mages college has the most amount of cut quests out of any of the other factions in the game in fact the major's college accounts for almost half of the cut quests still left in the data files of the game presumably there were many more planned quests throughout the game that just never reached the implementation stage like some of these quests did so some of these only survive in the creation kit to act as evidence of the cuts the mages guild suffered the other three quests looked to just be raiding quests not worth getting into and really that's all we got left at the college in terms of content the college hosts a lot of raiding quests or just simple errands like finding 12th year's alembic or cleansing the magic of fountains on the campus the most interesting aspect of some of these is the fact that they will boost the disposition of the quest givers which i find hilarious because saving the college won't get you [ __ ] sergius will continue to give back any compliments even after your archmage the only way to get him to like you is to give him some soul gems the only college reading quests i want to discuss are given by the librarian he actually has two different repeatable reading quests one is to just fetch a randomly generated book from a randomly selected dungeon the more interesting one is tracking down pieces of archmage shalador's writings the same as the other quest to fetch the books this radiant quest will pull from the full pool of dungeons available in the game including any from dragonborn this could actually lead to the book being gated behind a quest chain because it might direct you to a place like snow veil sanctum which you don't get access to until halfway into the thieves guild questline if that happens you can just reload and we'll probably pick another random location shalador's insights is interesting thanks to the possible rewards it will give upon returning the book the librarian will tell you to come back in 24 hours after he's done translating the fragment when you do he will give you either a scroll or a skill level up the scrolls are pretty cool and unique in their effects each scroll pertains to a school of magic for any of the schools except destruction the scroll will increase spell duration by 50 and reduce costs by 50 for two minutes while the destruction one will reduce cost by half and increase spell damage by 50 the skill benefits follow a similar path if he doesn't give a scroll he'll give a plus one to any magic school so no enchanting levels from this a measly plus one to a random magic school isn't all that hot though especially considering you gotta clear a dungeon to get it and you can probably net more than one level up from the same skills while in said dungeon after becoming archmage every so often tofja will inform us of a magic riff that has opened up somewhere in skyrim these rifts appear to be remnants of when the eye went haywire during the ancano incident the respect of yarl is paying the college a large sum of money to head over there and deal with the rift which i find hilarious in reality the college ought to be paying the yarl for any damages the college caused to their holds thanks to them dinking around with the eye instead it seems like the college is extorting the urls to clean up the mess the college itself caused despite what tolfdir says we don't actually need the staff of magnus to close the rifts we just got to show up and kill all the magic anomalies of the site in question yeah more fighting these guys and now that we're much higher leveled and those sprites never stop scaling their health we're in for some real fun times once it's all dealt with it's back to toftee who gives us a split of the extortion i mean reward from the yarl at level 40 plus this rewards 1500 gold which ain't too bad the quest can be repeated as many times as we want just keep asking tolphy if there's anything we need to know about and he'll give another randomly selected location funnily enough if the location happens to be in winterhold we won't get any reward because winterhold is on to the hustle here i don't know maybe arnold was right all along but now that we're on the subject of shaladorian dungeons i want to go back to labyrinthine for a bit while not part of the mages college or even a quest per se labyrinthian hosts more than a few interesting magical elements that make it worth talking about this section we already looked at the part of the mages college that does take us to it and we talked about the dragon priest masks which need to all be brought to labyrinthine to get the final mass but there's still shalador's maze we can go tackle the maze was said to have been built by shalador to test potential archmages but was abandoned after it was deemed too cruel it's also said to house the secrets shalador managed to steal from akatosh so naturally it sounds like a good place to visit turns out the maze part of the name is a misnomer as it's not really a maze at all but just two long hallways that turn and curve in concentric patterns finding your way through and getting lost is not really a thing with the maze you just keep walking forward and eventually reach the end it's incredible that somehow skyrim's lame puzzle elements even manages to ruin a maze occasionally you'll find some loot but what you'll really be looking out for are these panels that have symbols of the various schools of magic on them casting a targeted spell from the respective schools will unlock the way forward until reaching the end where a portal to the trial of conjuration will be waiting stepping inside teleports us to avoid arena where we will be attacked by a powerful drmore and some astronauts we will eventually be teleported back to the maze where the fight will play out some more until the dremore and all of its action knocks are dead the drumura will give us that powerful artifact of legend the diadam of the savant a circuit that reduces the cast cost of all spells by five percent it's such a measly amount it doesn't even register as a single magicka point reduction for a lot of the spells i looked at my spell book also it's classified as light armor with an armor rating of 8 but due to how the item is flagged it will not affect the mage armor perk so equipping it will give its rated 8 armor which is something i guess i also found this weird bog wear if i put on a shield spell and then equip a real helmet it brings my armor rating down because the mage armor part gets disrupted but if i then switch to the die dam it will boost my armor rating back up to the value of my shield spell with the mage armor perk but it won't apply the extra 8 points of armor from the die dim i have to then unequip and re-equip the circulate again to get the 8 points back which i mean you know it's not a big deal it's only 8 points but just look at all this ui gore from all of these conflicting perks and the bugged out diadem and i guess bugs and ui gore sounds like a good place to start wrapping up the mages college and our discussion of magic in general starting with magic in general it's just it's rough it's really rough at best i'd guess not enough people at bethesda really cared about developing the magic for skyrim and at worst i might think that there were a few people working on it who actually hated magic and had a grudge against it in the previous games there's no greater example of the reduction of magic than the removal of spellcrafting that was easily one of the coolest and most unique systems of daggerfall morrowind in oblivion even by the time skyrim was coming out spellcrafting was a distinguishing feature of the elder scrolls that could be held over many other rpgs was it broken in op yeah but as i've demonstrated already and will demonstrate in future videos there are plenty of broken and op systems left in skyrim that are just as accessible i don't know if it was a balancing thing to remove spell making a time constraint or just a technical nightmare but considering the other games on the same engine had it and it didn't return with one of the dlc's i'm led to believe it was an intentional design choice not to include it in doing so they forced the player to work with what's built into the game and while the breadth of the spells have been reduced tremendously in skyrim a lot of effort went into making the different spells feel unique unfortunately some schools were cut way harder than others and no school managed to really find a good balance between its spells and its perks most of the perk trees feel superfluous while others are just downright terrible most schools lack any ways of effectively scaling the magnitude of their spells which really hurts destruction in particular while a lot of schools and spells struggle to balance their magicka costs leading to a lot of waiting around for magicka to regen especially early game so how do we fix magic and skyrim short of rolling back to systems that worked perfectly fine in previous titles let's try and concoct something in the spirit of what scott was going for for starters spell making has to come back no question about it that's the key to making the magic systems of any elder squirrels game enjoyable and unique compared to other games without it well we already saw what we're left with it's doubly disappointing because skyrim has some of the most interesting spells mechanically speaking such as geyser spells runes chain spells and cloak spells and they all have unique casting properties charge up times and rules that radically change how the player needs to approach using them in combat these are the good changes skyrim brought to the table they make spell casting more visceral impactful deliberate and challenging having to equip spells in our hands means we can't just pop off a spell with a sword and a shield in each hand getting access to modify these spells in game would have been a really fun experience because then we aren't just considering how powerful the spells need to be we'd have to consider the mechanical overhead needed to be casting certain spells you might opt for spells with weaker effects because they'd be easier to cast in certain scenarios or spell might be weak in magnitude but have a lot of physical force making a new system that embraces experimenting with things and choosing spells that don't just have the highest dps would go a long way to improving the magic in skyrim making it so that mages have a serious presence on the field and are able to manipulate the entire flow of battle by doing things like throwing down a wall of flame spell would give mages a unique position in the combat space it would make mages feel more powerful without having to just up their damage numbers unfortunately spells like wall of flames suck and are horribly magika inefficient and so the proper way to play a mage is to sit in the back spamming dual casted bolt destruction spells with the impact perk stun lock being the most powerful enemies while your companions and summons clean up the trash mobs that's not controlling the flow of battle that's just babysitting a single enemy while your followers do most of the work it requires no strategic thinking and leads to some of the most monotonous and boring gameplay a mage could endure and those are two words that should never be associated with a magic playstyle come on guys it's magic the potential for making it fun is limitless another thing that needs to be completely reworked are all the skill trees and the perks the best trees are the ones that don't roadblock too much and don't require wasting perk points to get the things you want relevant to the build you are going for the worst ones require investing in the entire tree just to make their skill viable as i said earlier those cost reduction perks need to go make them automatic unlocks when the player hits 25 50 75 100 in their respective skills make most of the perks lead towards certain types of mage styles so we can really gear a character towards being a necromancer or a priest or a classic wizard or even a druid give us perks that synergize well with the other schools and give us perks that encourage using things like staves giving us a little overlap in the schools wouldn't hurt either not every maid should feel obligated to invest in restoration for that extra magicka regen maybe put some magical regen perk into the conjuration school as well if we want to get crazy dual casting could be expanded in so many different ways personally i think combining spell effects would be the way to go maybe if you summon a fire atronach with a lightning spell on the other hand you will get a fire etc with a lightning cloak on it or something or casting a shield spell with a healing spell will give a healing shield that will automatically heal the player while also giving a bit of armory this aspect is more wishful thinking than anything else but my point is that dual casting has a lot more potential than just more powerful version of the spell you're already casting improving shouts for mage players is a tricky thing because we need to improve the shout mechanics in general either shouts need to be upgraded to be the real combat game changers they were billed as or shouts need to be fleshed out into their own unique magic system with independent cooldowns for different types of shouts basically shouts need to either be made bigger or they need to be made more complex either of those would need to take place before we can even begin to think about how to make the system engaging for mages enough for them to bother with it as it stands only a handful of shouts should even be considered most of which are the universally useful shouts like dragon rand unrelenting force to become ethereal none of them in vanilla skyrim feel geared towards mage specifically perpetuating the idea that shouts are just discount spells for players who can't be bothered otherwise so piggybacking off of those ideas improving the magic faction follows similar logic we need a magic faction that first and foremost represents all facets of magic if the college favored a specific type of magic it was destruction due to the number of dungeons we ran through the most ignored magic skill was definitely enchanting which had no representation in any of its quests aside from some crappy radiant fetch quests the atronach forge could have been an opportunity to give enchanting a unique place at the college that would enable players to enchant things they normally couldn't at normal enchanters or give access to more powerful enchantments that should be the core design of a magic faction giving players access to things they cannot find elsewhere in the game honestly that should be the core of any faction but we're just talking magic here and i'm not even talking about some unique spell vendors i mean unique mechanics and exclusive opportunities the eye of magnus was an opportunity to make something like a unique trainer that deals in souls instead of gold ideas like that need to form the bones of the faction and the rest can be built around those aspects also give us a school that actually looks like a school if you're going to call the place a college make sure it looks the part i like the idea of the minute and giving the school all sorts of secrets but there needs to be a much greater follow-through than what we get in skyrim there's only three reasons to go down there and none of it fell well integrated with the rest of the school they just felt like a collection of miscellaneous ideas that really just had no better place to be in all in all i think bethesda was on the right track with the college but they just didn't take it to its logical conclusion the collection of trainers the spell vendors the master requests and even some of the side quests did help build the college up into something really worth a magic player's time the story was a mess the campus itself failed to impress and there's definitely a ton of room to expand and improve but i'd say the mages college is at least a serviceable faction for a magic player unfortunately that's pretty much exactly what i said about the mages guild in oblivion and delivering the same lukewarm overall experience is not something to strive for with a direct sequel in a franchise but i think it's time to say goodbye to the college for good sarian's got other ambitions now that he's achieved the magical equivalence of godhood the college was a boss when it came to powerful artifacts but over the course of his travels he's picked up on some interesting leads that just might deliver into his hands some items that are otherworldly sirian was not at all surprised to find septimus still pacing around his hole on the ice it had been a minute since septimus had put him on the path to finding that elder scroll but sarien is back to give him that lexicon so he can unlock his dwemer rubik's cube i glossed over his whole thing back during the main quest so let's refresh septimus located this lockbox and believes it contains the heart of lorkhan which is probably the most powerful artifact on nirn and was central to a whole lot of conflicts throughout history arniel as we just saw demonstrated that tapping into it was probably what made the dwemer vanish from the world so what crazy ass septimus might want with this thing is anybody's guess jokes on him though because the heart isn't actually in there after we give him the lexicon he mainlines that elder scroll knowledge to figure out that the lock box can actually open with the blood of a dwemer but seeing as there's no dwemer left alive that's a bit of a problem fortunately there's a workaround that just involves collecting the blood of all the currently living elephant races of tamriel sarian isn't too keen on mutilating the bodies of his fellow elves but when he's contacted by hermaeus mora to act as his new emissary when he's through using septimus sarian is all for it herma admits to just using the crazy old man who he himself admitted to doing a bunch of nasty crap for the demon of knowledge to get access to all this knowledge like the location of the lock box herma tells us that the heart isn't in there it's actually his agma infinium which would be very helpful for saryan so after pledging himself to this wretched abyss sarian goes out and fetches all that blood this just involves activating any dead body belonging to each elven race this is similar to herma's quest in oblivion that had us going around killing a member of each race in cyrodiil but unlike oblivion where we had all those wonderful remote shrines to harvest souls from we gotta do a little bit of light work in skyrim i just started clearing bandit and necromancer camps taking a pit stop at blackreach for the falmer blood until i had a sample of all the elephant races septimus once again mainlines the stuff and gets his box open only to have his hopes and dreams crushed when he sees the heart isn't in there just a book he's then turned to ash and we're given the book maura congratulates us and sarin is free to ding 100 in all his skills septimus is a really interesting character not just because of his raging insanity but also because he wasn't quite living anymore he never eats or sleeps in this cave which is probably not a developer oversight as it's a trivial task giving npcs the right ai packages to do that likewise when he dies he doesn't flop over he floats up and turns to ash like how a resurrected body will sometimes do and when he's being turned to ash he'll say how he sees the light and all that indicating his soul was probably being imprisoned by hermes mora i don't actually know how soft miss came to be a re-animated puppet for more and i doubt there's any real answers i just find it interesting that maura has that sort of power and now we work for him likewise there's no answers for how or why his agma infineon was sealed in a dwemer lockbox and buried under the ice in the wastes of skyrim for a few centuries i really like this quest it's one of my favorites and might even be my favorite of the daedric quests in skyrim it's got a good vibe to it that's consistent the whole way through and compelling enough to keep me engaged the whole time if we take going into blackreach as being part of this quest then it's pretty stellar going into blackreach searching for all this ancient lost knowledge listening to septimus's insane rants going out and harvesting blood from dead bodies talking to a lovecraftian monster it's all pretty top-notch and probably on par with what the college of winterhold could have channeled had it not been botched so badly it's a subtle type of horror like it's pretty easy to miss the fact that septimus wasn't even really alive anymore but it's good in leaving a lot open to think about and we even get a really powerful artifact at the end so what's not to love about this sticking to some quality quests the next one takes serion south a bit to the shrine of azura straight up i love this location whoever came up with the design for this shrine deserves a gold star this completely dunks on all the shrines to the danger we saw in oblivion for sure even morris who had a nice view from his the shrine had been built by the dunmer who'd flied morrowind before the eruption of red mountain thanks to the visions given to them by azura to show their gratitude towards the queen of the night sky her followers built this stunning shrine to thank them for their devotion azera continued to give her followers terrifying and disturbing visions until all but one ran away because that's how azura rolls serene shows up and the lone azura devotee recognizes sarin from one of her visions arena tells him that he'd been chosen to be azara's champion since before he'd even been born because that's how his error rolls his destiny is to seek out an elven mage who can turn the brightest star black as night in a fort threatened by water but untouched by it this line always manages to throw me off because i automatically assume she's referring to the actual fort where zerastar is located in but then she explains the cryptic vision and says that this fort is probably the city of winterhold i don't know why but it catches me off guard every single time in winterholds we can come across nelakar a former member of the college of winterhold who worked below another mage maelyn studying azera's star after getting banished from the college for killing another student and using her soul to experiment on the star malin left for illinois's deep to continue his research nellicar tells us that's where the star likely is but if we do retrieve it we shouldn't bring it back to the lady on the mountain but instead bring it to him he warns us that the daedric princes can't be trusted and reuniting azura with her star would be a mistake trust me bro i'm well aware of how shitty these princes can be elenada's deep turns out to be a pretty cool dungeon and one of the most memorable in skyrim you can see why this place would come to my mind whenever i hear that prophecy the imperial fort just one day fell into the lake and now necromancers and their undead abominations inhabit its flooded halls it's visually unique fun and challenging and more than a little creepy so we're two for two on creepy danger quests turning out to be pretty good near the end of the dungeon we find that the necromancers have been kidnapping locals to sacrifice their souls to azera's star which melin managed to corrupt in order to store his own soul inside in order to live on forever the star was badly damaged from his experiments and has grown unstable requiring more and more souls to keep it sustained i really don't know what any of these necromancers are getting out of the sacrificing of all these people to the star seems like kind of a pyramid scheme where they do all the work and barrel the risks while mailing gets to live the good life of immortality in the star but who knows maybe they're using the star to enchant with or something because that is its primary function after all the star is a rechargeable soul gem and now we have a choice to make bring it back to arenas so she can use the magic of azura to cleanse the star and return it to its former glory or bring it to nellikar who will use this magic to sever the star from azura in both cases we will be transported into the star to evict malin but aaronia will turn the star into a white soul gem while nellicar will turn it into a black soldier we didn't really talk about the differences between white and black souls but basically it goes like this white souls are creatures blacker people the thing is black souls are always grand souls while white souls can range from petty to grand so a lowly bandit can give us a grand soul if you have a black soul gem otherwise you'll have to track something really powerful down like a giant if you want to make this star a white gem again it then can only trap creatures souls so if you want to fill it with grand white souls you'll have to go out and find a rare and powerful creature if you turn it black all you gotta do is kill some bandit or something this distinction makes it almost impossible to bring it back to aaronia to put this another way i've completed this quest on pretty much every character i've ever played on that made it past level 15 or so and i've never turned it over to arnie i didn't even know you get to talk to azura if you bring it back to the shrine until i read that on the uesp just now because i've literally never done that in the 10 or so times that i've done this quest and that's insane azura star is a universally useful trinket for any player because even if you're a stealth archer using an enchanted bow the star makes it a trivial task to keep the bow topped up just soul trap abandoned and bam you got yourself pretty much a full charge on any weapon and i don't think i need to explain the benefit the black star will provide for an enchanter this lopsided reward is really the only demerit against this quest they even tried to make up for it by making aurania a follower once we return it to his proper form she's a good mage follower but she caps out at level 30 so yeah i'll take the black star thank you the fight against malin is also a real [ __ ] of a fight a proper boss battle done well in skyrim it doesn't rely on any stupid gimmicks like sapping all your magika he's just a tough bastard and surrounded by equally ball busting daedra the arena isn't going to work much to your advantage either so you got to be really clever here and be ready for an actual fight a good way to end a really solid quest regardless of what rnia says about saren being a blasphemer for corrupting the star sarian suspects he made the right choice here and azura doesn't really care too much if she's capable of seeing the future and all that surely she knew who she was dealing with when she asked sirian of all people to collect this thing sarian's not too concerned he's much more concerned about looking over his shoulder for the random group of necros from maelyn's gang that will randomly jump him for stealing the star because yeah that becomes a raiding event after completing this quest after finishing up in winterholds sarin stuck to the north and wandered into dawnstar the town is currently undergoing a bit of a nightmare problem and it's making everyone in town a little cranky speaking to the priest of mara hanging around the inn arander explains that the nightmares are being caused by vermeena the daedric prince of dreams and nightmares turns out a bunch of priests devoted to the prince set up shop in a old fort overlooking the town and arander here wants sarian to help him lift the curse learning by this point to just say yes whenever daedric princes are involved serene agrees to help the guy figuring there's gotta be some powerful artifact related to someone who can ensnare a whole town now you'd think the yarl would be casting a wide net trying to catch any leads at all on the nightmare problem but with the way he's written this doesn't sound too off-brand for him the only thing punching holes in this setup is the fact that those priests had set up shop in that fort decades ago and nobody in that time thought to go poking around that giant ominous tower overlooking the town especially now that the town is having these problems the jarl didn't think to send some guards to scout around the perimeter of the town to see if there's a local source for the problem the tower is literally a two minute walk away even when accounting for tes distance compression that tower is still practically next door if someone thought to actually check out the tower they'd find a place full of priests and orc raiders all taking a nap arander eventually comes clean and explains that he was actually a priest here but fled when the raiders came out of desperation the priests released the miasma a gas that is capable of putting its subjects to sleep for years in order to slow their aging so that they can be used for certain rituals now he's a priest of mara and has come to write the wrongs of his past by lifting the curse on dawn star the sirian is of course not at all interested in this dude's backstory and redemption arc he cares about the other thing arander mentions the staff of corruption a powerful artifact of verminas is probably the source of this curse presumably these staffs hunger for dreams is causing it to reach out and harvest the dreams of the people and dawnstar now so yeah sarian needed to get his hands on that thing we head into the library to look for a tome that would help miranda figure out a way past the magical barriers in the fort this is one of those classic skyrim moments because aranda tasks us with finding the book in the trash library so i went okay i guess i gotta start carefully searching the bookshelves and reading the titles of the books and oh it just gave me a quest market of the book mirander uses the book to confirm we need a special potion the priests use to enter a dream state that lets the user live another person's memories same deal as before we enter a trashed lamp the quest sets itself up as a scavenger hunt only to then put a quest marker on the item at least this room has a bunch of rare alchemy ingredients that makes it worth it to take the time to pick throughout the shelves we're told to drink the strange potion and we do instantly teleporting us into a vision of the past where the orcs have been attacking the tower and the miasma was released this sequence is as chanky as you'd expect with my favorite bit of jank being that the raiders and the priests were given unlimited health but not unlimited magicka so you could just stand there watching two npcs going at it until the priest runs out of match and switches to his fists because he wasn't given any backup weapons only to switch back to magic for a second before running out of magicka again and switching back to his fists oh i feel your pain brother once we release the miasma in the dream we are transported back to reality where we are now standing in front of the chain that released the gas i ended up running down to the final chamber where i found aranda already waiting even though i forgot to drop the gate to light him through he wouldn't say anything because i still need to activate that lever miranda just erroneously got teleported down there i guess once i did what i was supposed to do it was back to the chamber for the final encounter with two of verander's former colleagues this can be a bit of a challenging encounter because everyone is throwing spells around pro tip chain lightning works exceptionally well here arander then runs up to the staff and begins invoking the power of mara to destroy the staff that's when vermeena begins whispering in seren's ear that arander is only leading him on and will claim the staff for himself and turn on serene once he has it assarian doesn't care one way or the other what irandra's plans are because he came here looking for an artifact and he intends to leave with one so he naturally turns on arander who turns out to be a harder fight than one might expect arander is pretty tanky he's not going to do much damage with his spells but he will break off the heel if given the chance but nobody stands a chance against impact firebolt and with the deed done the staff is now sirians if we decide to ignore vermin's whispers and let arander finish his ritual he proves true to his word and succeeds in destroying the staff which i mean we all know how these things go firmino will just conjure it back into the world again in the future but at least dawnstar will be safe this outcome is a lot like the one returning the star to azure shrine we get shifted on the artifact but are rewarded with a follower instead as arander will pledge his surface to us if we wanted as a follower miranda is kinda mediocre he's got a max level of 50 which is actually really high for a follower but his book is just trash it's just a bunch of low-level destruction restoration spells and his skills include speech alchemy and smithing which is baffling and conjuration even though he has no contrariation spells so once again outside of rping i don't see why anyone would choose keeping him over the staff even if the staff of corruption is kinda meh so the steph has a very unique property in that it can harvest the dreams of sleeping npcs in order to boost its effective damage unboosted the staff will do 20 points of damage in a 15 foot radius boosted it goes up to 50 points in order to harvest dreams the player needs to use the staff on sleeping npcs this is a painless non-hostile action so the npc shouldn't wake up or be triggered hostile by the effect it's a neat idea and i'm all for unique mechanics and artifacts like this unfortunately this staff is just not very powerful even when it's boosted up as well it still requires souls to keep it charged so this is just another maintenance requirement that doesn't add a whole lot to the effect of the staff it's very easy to burn through its stored dreams due to the area of effect i even managed to make it go negative one during my testing i could see the staff being decent at a lower level but by level 60 this thing is kind of worthless i burned through all the stored dreams in a single encounter and i'm not about to sit there spamming 20 point damage effects at high level enemies i'm torn on the staff because the skull of corruption already had a really cold unique effect in oblivion and morrowind in those games the staff would duplicate an npc that was hostile towards the npc that had been duplicated that made the skull one of the best tools for causing chaos especially in towns while the dream steel mechanic is cool the actual effect of the staff is a massive downgrade from its previous versions ultimately it just found a place on the display rack at meyer watch because the staff at least has a cool design that makes it a good display piece as for dawn star whether we take the staff or let aranda destroy it their nightmare woes will come to an end don't expect any sort of reward from the yarl though and really don't expect much of anything from anybody seems only the yarl and the guards will make note of how the nightmares stopped everyone else just stops mentioning them all the time and reverts to their generic dialogue this quest had an interesting setup and a lot of potential but the follow through really let the rest of the experience down resulting in waking nightmare turning out to be one of the weaker danger quests in skyrim speaking of a step down let's discuss our last stage request for this video done with dawnstar serene makes it to solitude looking for work after a warm introduction to how solitude gets things done sirian ends up running into this strange beggar wandering the streets looking for his master he beseeches sarin to help find him as his empire is crumbling with his years of absence anyone who has some amount of exposure to this franchise ought to recognize this guy is looking for sheogorath the digit prince of madness lord of the never there sovereign of the shivering isles or as skyra makes him meme lord of random humor i'm willing to admit i bought the shayogarth hype during the shivering isles expansion in oblivion i thought he was charming funny and entertaining and while i'm no longer 13 and his characterization in that game lost a lot of its luster i can still appreciate his portrayal enough in that expansion not to let it tarnish my overall extremely positive opinions of that expansion this quest though receives none of that support for starters i'm no longer 13. and secondly we don't have the supreme quality of these shivering aisles to dilute the shoegorth character into tolerable doses i'm just gonna come right out and say it this has got to be one of the worst quests in skyrim it's certainly my most attested many other players consider this one of skyrim's high points which okay we're all entitled to our wrong opinions but this quest even from a gameplay perspective is just bad it's a railroaded script heavy experience the likes of which eclipses anything else we can find in skyrim it reduces the player's agency down to zero not to tell a compelling story or set up an interesting premise or even dish out some quality lore but instead to just rapid fire random humor skits that are going to be lost on a lot of people there's a time and a place for that sort of thing and i don't begrudge that something that just isn't for me exists i resent that this is the follow-up act to one of the finest things bethesda has ever crafted they had a 40 hour long expansion worth of details they could have pulled from to build upon but instead they went with playing up the kooky shayo meme and calling it a day and the fact that it worked on a lot of players is more than a little concerning but let's get back to the events of the quest dervin in here tells us shayo is in the abandoned wing of the blue palace visiting an old friend and gives us pelagius hip bone so that we can enter the first task is getting access to the abandoned wing it had been sealed off for years because it's believed to be haunted so you can't just wander in a bit of a sequence break here but by the time i was doing this quest i was already thane of solitude so i just asked falk firebeard for permission to enter but failing that the player needs to ask the servants to get in anyway we end up getting in there we eventually get teleported to a strange realm where we see the prince himself sitting at a banquet table with former imperial emperor pelagius the mad as his name suggests he was mentally unwell during his reign which of course translates to paranoid and cruel in the realm of fantasy writing for some reason fantasy writers always seem to forget the debauchery aspect of caligula nero and commodus which i think make for much more interesting stories than just he was cruel in any event we can ask cheo to go back to the shivering isles and he concedes but wants us to help fix the mind of the dead tyrant because well it would be funny to pull this off he gives us an instrument of tremendous value can you guess what it is the one attack huh didn't see that coming did you you're welcome we then have to go through three different sequences where we fix some aspect of pelagius's psyche these all boil down to the same gimmick use the wabbit jack on pelagius and anything that pops up around him until the objective is complete this non-puzzle channels the same energy the elder scroll reading dwemer device from blackreach had that is it isn't a puzzle there's no wrong choices here nothing to experiment with and absolutely no options this is skyrim at its most self-indulgent so sure that they were in the quality and novelty of the premise here that the devs offer nothing else to supplement the experience so if you don't care for the jokes well there's nothing else in this for you except the fact that it ends quickly there's honestly nothing here even worth analyzing as this is just one step above quick time events after we're done solving pelagius's nightmares self-loathing and paranoia we are rewarded with another conversation with the mad god where he spouts some more random bits and then boots us back to skyrim with the rabbit track as a reward and what a reward it is if the quest is a boring shlock of fan service then the waba jack is a pretty damn awesome tool of chaos and destruction i'm going to un-ironically read off the uesp page here because it summarizes these staff's numerous effects more concisely than i can the staff applies a variety of random effects on the target it is used against it can randomly cause 60 points of fire frost or shock damage absorb attributes make the target invisible heal the target by 75 points and in some cases instantly kill the target along with its offensive abilities it can also randomly transform a target into a chicken rabbit mud crab gemora more rarely into a sweet roll or a shower of 50 gold coins along with a pile of ash transforming the target into a sweet roll or gold coins usually terminates the target however if the rabbit track is used to transform a target into an animal it only delays the fight as they often transform back a short time later with full health using it on the same target will return them to their true form where the fight could continue as normal in my own testing the wabachek proved to be pretty damn powerful even at level 60 plus which is a serious accomplishment when compared to pretty much every other item we've come across yet the unpredictable nature of it is pretty easy to deal with because you can just keep spamming the staff until you get one of the more useful effects it only has a total number of 20 charges and requires a decent amount of souls to recharge fully but in this case that's a pretty sensible act of balancing plus it just looks really good the r design on this staff was on point for sure after having to deal with that serene decided he'd had his fill of daedric princes now that he's in solitude he finds himself in a good position to accumulate the last thing he finds himself lacking legitimate political power the first quest we'll be looking at is lights out i wasn't going to cover it because it's honestly not a very interesting quest to analyze but then i read a very wonderful article on screen rant that said that this quest was one of reddit's favorite quests so now i feel duty bound to tear it down and make people super mad actually it's not a bad quest i'm just surprised people consider it noteworthy at all let alone considered a favorite of theirs the premise goes we run into this shady argonian lurking in some corner in solitude who hits us up with a proposition if we snuff out the fire at the lighthouse an imperial trading vessel is likely to run aground where his crew will be able to board it and rob the joint he promises nobody will be hurt his crew are professionals after all and as a reward he'll split the loot with us sounds simple getting to the lighthouse is probably the biggest challenge here since it's out of the way a bit but there's no guards or anything to stop us from putting out its flame which is kind of weird because you'd think there would be someone up here tending to the flame but i guess not once that's done we meet back up with jarira who tells us we did good and that the ship ran aground as planned so we should head over there and grab what is ours and we do get led aboard down into the hold of the ship where gerira's sister is waiting for us along the way we can see joey res crew didn't let any imperials go as they had promised but instead slaughtered everyone on the ship not a good omen for what's to come deja tells us to get [ __ ] they already took the loot back to their hideout and now it's time to die apparently this plot twist was the big thing that blew the minds of a bunch of predators okay then after we slay dija get the location of the hideout of our body and kill the rest of the pirate crew we can head on over to the hideout this part is the real noteworthy part of the quest as the dungeon is one of the most visually unique dungeons in the game the designers did a great job building this hidden underground pirate base with its own sunken ship at its center jerry run his goons are all inhabiting the unsubmerged part of the ship and some fortifications they built on on some scaffolding if you can't make a super unique and interesting premise for requests putting in a cool location will do the trick too once everyone's dead we're free to loot the place what i find funny is that this quest counts towards the do good deeds to help the people of solitude objective needed to become faint of the city i literally went into this getting ready to pillage and loot a merchant ship it's kind of ironic that i'm getting brownie points for slaying the people who double-crossed me with that out of the way sarian finally made it to the blue palace where he was ready to offer his services to whatever important person needed it turns out solitude's got a whole lot of fires and potential fires it's got to deal with in the midst of this whole civil war who'd have thought it takes saren about 10 seconds to get enlisted by yarl elsif steward falk firebeard to go check out the cave that some locals are claiming unnatural things are going down in when we get there we find out that despite what folk firebeard had been wishing the place is filled with necromancers trying to resurrect patema the quest is then just a typical dungeon crawl though there's some nice environments to look at and some dialogue and story to take in while we're clearing the place our task becomes stopping the ritual and preventing potama's return which i mean it would have been cool if we actually got to you know help bring her back considering we can actually play a necromancer now it's really silly that the game continues to assume we will never want to join a cult if we're taking some rituals after we slay the necromancers performing the ritual patema disappears and the ruins fall silent we assume everything's fine now and potamo is stopped so we report to firebeard and tell him the good news he pretty much [ __ ] bricks when he hears what had happened because potamo was literally one of the worst things to have ever happened to the empire to make a long story short she was a crazed power hungry queen who managed to instigate a civil war in order to install her son on the imperial throne for a bit her usurping son was eventually killed and order was mostly restored but she retreated to solitude where she marshaled an army of undead and daedra to defend the city for a decade she eventually died in solitude and her necromantic army was put down but naturally this has had a lasting legacy on the people of solitude though it turns out we didn't stop her return in that cave because her spirit managed to escape and has moved back into her necro fortress beneath solitude so firebeard enlists us again to take care of her permanently he sends us to steyer who fills us in on what little details there are and explains a bit more of the patema lore for players who are unaware then it's into the temple where someone dead had broken into the basement that connects to patema's lair it's just another standard undead dungeon run nothing that interesting until we reach the end where we get the boss fight with potama her gimmick is twofold resurrecting a lot of undead and this beam of electricity that sweeps across the entire arena there are a few nooks the player can hide in but this is one of the few fights that seems really well suited for become ethereal without making the shout seem brokenly overpowered after dispatching some of her minions she enters a second phage which is noteworthy in of itself because we rarely see skyrim bosses with multiple phases in this phase she will summon more menacing undead and will spawn a second beam opposite the first one so the sweeps come twice as fast this is when the fight gets pretty tricky especially for a mage because electric damage is just so potent against one the game gives you a couple of resist shock potions early in the dungeon and i'd recommend using them after killing her minions we enter her third and final face after getting a nice little light show we enter her quarters where her ghostly remains will fight us once again beware for shock damage it stinks pretty bad once she's gone for good we can make off with her remains to be purified by the priest of rk and eliminate her threat once and for all generally speaking this is one of the rare good boss fights in skyrim it can be a little easy to cheese though if you just kite everything out of the chamber and into the previous hallway which makes me wonder why they didn't lock the door behind us when we entered but if we fight this fare you're going to be in for a decent challenge that actually offers an opportunity for a turn undead to be useful with potama dead firebeard rewards us with the shield of solitude which is a pretty solid unique heavy armor shield that offers a 30 bump to magic resistance and block its base armor is pretty decent too but it can't be upgraded so it's going to be outclassed after a point a decent reward for completing a fairly okay dungeon crawling quest for a dungeon crawl quest chain it's fine mostly because the patema fight turns out to be well designed by skyrim boss fight standards but for sarian the reward was the gratitude of the yarl and her court with this he's now in the good graces of most everyone there especially the all herself by this point sarian decides to start poking around the court a bit more and that's when he comes across sybil the court wizard for elisa everyone keeps their distance around her because sybil turns out to be very weird some people will make note of how she doesn't seem all that natural such as the cook who mentions he never even sees her eating running up to her it's like yeah guys she's a vampire hello glowing eyes turns out though that the dawnguard dlc made her character design a lot more obvious in vanilla skyrim she was just a little pale and pointy much more subtle and explains why everyone isn't quite sure what the deal is with her she also has a reputation for going into the dungeons and using prisoners for experiments she also openly criticizes elisa and doubt she will be sticking around very long and she also seems to enjoy needling firebeard but a lot of people put up with her antics because her magic has been coming in handy for the civil war basically she's girl boss material to the t so much so she tells us how solitude has a bit of a vampire problem and she wants us to go clear at a nest of them to which she's almost sure we will perish this sybil is pretty much what delphine wished she was sarian not ever doing so well in the presence of strong women like this slinks off to the vampire cave to clear it out as he was told sybil doesn't even compliment him or thank him after he returns successful she just takes the opportunity to diss her undomesticated brethren and toy with sarian by hinting at her true nature some more sybil is like septimus one of those characters that are easy to sleep on no pun intended there i swear it makes me wonder if she was going to have more content related to her or if she was just one of those characters that exists just to add something interesting for players paying attention but she's a source of all kinds of information and stands in a very interesting and busy crossroad she can give a surprisingly human recollection of the death of king torig she also explains the events surrounding his death but curiously doesn't use words like murderer or anything like that that might indicate she hates ulfric she seems to understand that this is just business but also explains how ulfric probably misread the room with torig because had alfred approached the new high king with ideas of breaking off with the empire he probably would have agreed with him and that torg even respected ulfric for his beliefs and his brashness i'll probably bring these details up again when we talk the civil war in the next video because it's really super important and it's something i never hear players discuss i bring it up now though because it really helps show solitude as this city sort of conflicted and stunned by the events of the civil war elisa is clearly struggling to fill the shoes of her late husband she relies a lot on her advisors and it's clear all of her advisors are up to their own tricks bro firefighter included this all manifests in the city feeling palpably on edge and the fact that bethesda is able to make this feeling come across so well in this city that looks so bright and welcoming in comparison to the rest of skyrim is a real accomplishment i used to discount solitude a lot but after doing only about half of the content the city has on offer i can safely say it's one of skyrim's best cities that might be a short race as we will see when i get to reviewing more of the major cities later on but solitude has a really solid theme bethesda was aiming for and i think they managed to hit it pretty well the solitude is meant to be this political economic and cultural bastion in skyrim but it has a really dark history with corrupt rulers civil war necromancy and just generally dark days its layout leaves a lot to be desired as it's literally just one long road with the legion fort strapped to its hip and it could have used a few more shops to really sell its wealth but the visual design and the undertones of its npc's quests and lore help make it something definitely worth exploring having done enough good for her city to trust him elsif asks sarian for a tricky favor she wants her husband to receive the full and proper burial rites of a nord and that involves making offerings to talos obviously with a ban on talos worship and the empire and the empire being the reason she has any power at all making an offering herself in person would be just straight up insanity while she does not believe in his divinity her husband did and she wants to honor him as much as she can so she asks if serene can deliver his horn to the remote shrine of talos and make the offering in her stead genuinely touched by her devotion and virtue and knowing this would guarantee a close working relationship with one of the most important people in skyrim sarian agrees to make the delivery turns out some thalmor agents were staking the shrine out waiting for worshipers to come by so they could snatch them off and drag them to some dungeon somewhere to repent for their blasphemy sirian was sure those thalmor were more than a little confused to see a high elf delivering a nord's horn to the shrine but that didn't stop them from coming out blasting esserian makes short work of them and then heads back to elsif who rewards him handsomely by naming him thane of solitude after he bought the expensive mansion of course and with that he finally had it real legitimate political power in skyrim i mean sure he was already thane of whiterun but thing of solitude sounded so much better especially in high rock to close things out on a lighter tone let's discuss the bard's college this second college i imagine was meant to have much more content though i doubt it was ever envisioned as a full-blown faction regardless what's here delivers the trappings of a guild but funnily enough while the other factions will let us walk in without much effort the bart's college puts us through an extensive ordeal to become a member fortunately for serion they aren't going to test his non-existent musical skills turns out there is much more to being a bar than just having a good singing voice the bards college has always put on a festival every year that involves the burning of an effigy of king olaf a controversial figure from skyrim's history elsif put the brakes on the whole thing though and banned the festival because burning the effigy of a king shortly after the king of solitude was murdered would be in poor taste and she being the widow of the king that only kind of makes it worse vrmo wants to prove to elisif that the festival is a celebration of solitude and not some anti-monarch ritual but to do that he needs us to find the ancient missing verse of the oral history of skyrim he tells us the verse is in dead men's respite and sarin goes oh hey i already found that here you go once again this is one of those things that you can just find out in the world before getting the quest but doing that here kind of spoils the discussion so let's just turn back the clock and pretend that didn't happen so the lore keeper of the college tells us that the bard who wrote the scathing verse against king olaf was put to death then it was thought that all the copies of the verse had been burned turns out olaf had the bard and a copy of the verse buried in olaf's tomb with him i guess it's some sort of posthumous flex on the silly bard the bard will be getting the last laugh though because when we get there his ghost is able to direct us to the tome buried with his skeleton in some closet at the back of the dungeon speaking of the dungeon there's almost nothing noteworthy here there's a part with a bunch of door puzzles that can be confusing trying to navigate especially if you're trusting the quest marker to lead you straight to where you need to go but nothing a little trial and error can't solve the only other noteworthy thing is the encounter with king olaf's undead form we enter into a boss battle at the end of the dungeon against a host of draugr minions but aided by the restless spirit of the bard this battle is nothing at all interesting though especially since our ghost companion is completely invulnerable to all damage great for a mage who is prone to running out of magicka but it really deflates the whole encounter olaf himself is just a drugger overlord literally nothing at all to distinguish him from any other this is surprising because olaf was such an important figure not only in skyrim history but in the game itself that he made an appearance in savangard along with the nemesis bar seems like the two have patched things up after spending all this time in savangard though which makes the events back in skyrim even more bizarre why is olaf a draugr and why is svaknir a bitter ghost if both of them are in saving guard granted svaknir won't pop up in savangard unless we complete this quest but that still doesn't help explain away any of olaf's part inconsistent lore surrounding draugr aside will you make it back to the bards college to work on the verse with viarmo turns out a bunch of the parts of the verse are redacted so we decide to fill in the blanks this part lets us choose what to include for a couple of missing parts ranging from saying olaf convinced the other yarrows to attack solitude two saying olaf was actually a dragon in human form it's a neat little nod to the creative liberties one can take when working with the gaps in history kind of like what i did with the main story part of this video you know sometimes the blanks are just more fun than the truth after vrmo presents the new verse to elisif and convinces her the festival is good pr she agrees to let the bards put the show back on it's here we get to see the effigy burning and are inducted into the college as a fully fledged bard this gives us access to three of the easiest skill reward quests in the game as each one sends us to a dungeon to retrieve a unique instrument as a reward each quest gives plus one to every combat magic and stealth skill respective to the three instruments this once more makes me wonder as to the original idea behind the bards college was there really going to be a barred playstyle in this game with different instruments offering different bonuses to the three playstyles or was this always meant to just be as simple as it turns out to be it's impossible to say but i can say that this school definitely feels more like a school than the mages college did this place actually has real classes we can send in on and listen to and the place has a genuine collegial vibe to it it's definitely got a less cynical approach to its design than the college of winterhold did but aside from a few side quests and their skill rewards it really has nothing to offer the player not even a bed to sleep in with the business of the college settled saryan didn't really know what to do with himself he'd been building himself up in skyrim for some time now he'd entered this province with every intention of racing to the city he now finds himself an honored friend of he'd accumulated power wealth prestige and everything else he could have ever wanted but sitting in the bards college trying to convince himself it was time to settle down he found himself restless something had been bugging him for a while now ever since he'd learned he was dragonborn a group of cultists one day just randomly attacked maniversat calling him a false dragonborn and that some merak fellow was the true dragonborn siren didn't pay their blustering much thought at the time what with all that was going on with the dragon attacks and delphine sending him all over the place but now that he had time to think on it something just wasn't sitting right so he decided to say screw it he gathered his things and made off for windhelm where he'd be able to catch a boat east he couldn't shake the feeling that something was lying for him at soulstime and so that's where he was going to head off to next but that's the story that's going to be for another video dragonborn was originally going to be how i was going to end this video but there's no way i can do that dlc justice and get this video out in any sort of timely manner so let's finish things up with some final thoughts for the video wrapping up these large deconstructed videos is tough because i really have some grand thesis i need to wrap up for stuff like the main quest i summed everything up at the close of those sections for things like these side quests and the date requests well there's really nothing groundbreaking to be said about them as like whole which is why i'm choosing to cover them in bits and pieces throughout each video i guess then i'll just talk about my experience as a whole while playing surrey in the mage despite my constant complaining there was enough fun to be had during the playthrough that i can safely say i enjoyed about 50 to 70 of my time sure the moment-to-moment game play as a mage involves a lot of down time in the early game and later on it just evolves into abusing cheesy things because not doing so is going to involve even more tedium but i still had some fun with it it helps that when i'm actually able to cast spells and i'm not doing something to apply optimally the magic system can provide some fun illusion magic in particular is something i definitely want to focus on with a future character though maybe with some mods because its perk tree is dreadful and probably not as a pure mage because illusion and destruction just don't really mix well conjuration is another skill i'd really like to mess around with more especially bound weapons maybe i'll do some sort of illusionist conjurer stealth build to test things out for when i get to doing the stealth part of these videos and you see this is the prom i have with pretty much every video i've seen on skyrim you just cannot get a complete picture of what skyrim has to offer and what its systems can do by just playing one character honestly i don't think i'm even gonna be able to do it with three characters i think i'm going to end up having to run through some things with three other characters off camera because of how focused and limited some of the content vanilla skyrim actually is you can make some pretty radical changes to a character by just focusing on using a couple new spells and shouts people who say all the weapons spells and abilities in the game are shallow copies of one another are just being reductive there is depth here it's just not apparently obvious and it takes quite a bit of knowledge of these systems and the content in the game to get a lot of the unique aspects of these systems to come out of hiding and at the end of the day yeah a lot of the experience does involve just running through dungeons we didn't get to discussing them in this video because it's such a big topic and i already had this video packed with heavy topics trust me though we got plenty of time in the next few videos to discuss all the things that i haven't hit in this video where my experience as a mage really lacked were on the things i already harped on perks skill trees gear power progression and the removal of spellcrafting a lot of these things sadly there's just no way to compensate and work around you just gotta put up with the fact that no matchka is the way of life in the beginning of the game you also gotta accept the fact that restoration is not a perfectly valid school of magic ordinator and apocalypse spells are two mods that really help make magic and skyrim a more consistently fun experience but even those mods have their limits my best advice to those who want to mess with magic and avoid the tediousness pick two or three schools you want to focus on and replace the rest with some sort of backup skill like one-handed or archery also you would do well to pick an armor class to specialize in so you can actually enjoy finding loot in this game oh and if i haven't made it already clear in this video don't buy anniversary edition or any of the creation club content it's all pretty terrible and there are mods that do all of it better for free if you're only going to take one thing from this video let it be that don't buy it anyways if you got anything you want to discuss skyrim or otherwise my discord is the way to go i'm open to feedback and suggestions for the next few videos particularly i need help with selecting side content to cover i don't have time to hit every single quest in the game that would be way too much work for a lot of stuff that would probably end up just being synopsis so i want to know what you guys want me to cover i'm already committed to covering all the data quests and the big quest chains like the force one conspiracy but everything else is up for grabs including any side stuff in the dlcs or if you just think there's a certain dungeon i should check out or something in creation club that might be interesting to discuss let me know either on discord in the comments below i'll probably make a pinned comment so all you guys can post your suggestions directly there because filtering through comments on youtube is a nightmare otherwise like i said in the beginning i don't know when part 2 will be coming out but it will be the combat character so i will be covering the civil war the companions dawnguard now i'm still on the fence on exactly how that dlc will be getting covered because of the differences between joining the dawnguard and the vamps i might just feature it in two videos or something and i'll probably be knocking out a lot of my planned side content and date requests with that character just to get the run times a little more equal between the videos most likely the next three videos will be shorter than this one which should help the turnaround on them i'll almost certainly be releasing some other non-skyrim videos between the next few parts that i don't have this awful gap in my release schedule like i had between this video and me3 video yeah i apologize for that i'm finishing my last year of college and this past semester was pretty rough i had to halt all production while i was focused on school but we should be in the clear going forward nothing's really certain though and i won't commit to anything except getting these skyrim videos done at some point other than that links to my discord twitter and my live stream archives which have a couple of skyrim streams in the description below i also have a second channel for posting dumb clips on some of which have made it into this video i might end up doing some impromptu streams on that channel in the future so you might want to consider subscribing to it anyways i appreciate everyone's continued support and patience while i work on these things naturally they take a ton of time to make but i think the results are well worth the effort thank you all for watching and i'll see you in the next one [Music] there are few places where one can pursue my type of work without fear of persecution [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Private Sessions

Views: 962,930

Keywords: pc, steam, retrospective, rpg, role playing, rp game, long-form, long-form analysis, analysis, video game analysis, review, game review, bethesda, skyrim, TES5, the elder scrolls, elder scrolls, the elder scrolls V skyrim, the elder scrolls 5 skyrim, tes5 skyrim, tesv skyrim, tesv, stormcloaks, empire, tamriel, cyrodiil, ulfric, dragons, mages guild, mages college, daedric, quests, magic, magicka, mage, mages, alduin, paarthurnax, benor, delphine, lydia, arngir, esbern, creation club, cc, creation club content

Id: vYfbJVEYKj0

Length: 444min 59sec (26699 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 19 2022