Thanks to everyone tuning in. ANCIENT DRAGONBORN: I learned they weren't Dragonborn at pretty much the last possible minute (while listing out all the Dragonborn near the end of Act 2) and made the decision to just leave the mistakes in out of laziness, but also the realization that the mistake says more about the characters than anything I could have written. If they had been utilized better, I doubt an error like that would have survived in my script long.
I love how the Riften Thieves' Guild discuss all their plans directly under the open well in the middle of the town market and they wonder why they have bad luck. Then they hire a mute and things suddenly turn around.
it's crazy how urag is like one of the most memorable characters from skyrim simply because "the arcaneum might as well be my own little plane of oblivion" is just such a character establishing line
@@pquonbbx the line isnt even that insanely good but the fact that most of skyrim's dialogue is extremely boring makes the times where it's kind of good stick out so much more
The Silver Hand is a group of people who lost family an loved ones to Werewolves. So, they joined together for revenge. See Bethesda, wasn’t hard to make a simple back story
And they would go on to do it again with the _Gunners_ Just slightly better eqquiped raiders in the same way the Silverhand are just slightly different Bandits.
They could have also been lead by people who were originally Companions until they found out about the whole werewolf thing. Hell maybe they were railroaded into joining the circle or leaving like the player is lol. Just like that there is an extra layer to a non-faction.
I'd have joined them, given the option. The Companions are a bunch of preening, arrogant, self-serving, entitled assholes who talk a good game about honour, and glory, but are really just a bunch of lazy thugs and literal bloodthirsty monsters. I've never so intensely disliked a faction in an Elder Scrolls game...except maybe the Stormcloaks. Not even the Thieves Guild or Dark Brotherhood, who are like, supposed to be immoral. But the Companions are presented as 'good'.
@@MediumRareOpinionsGoes even further back than that. Remember Talon company from Fallout 3? A group that is insanely organized and has more locations under their grip than any single faction in the game and you’re never given any backstory to them beyond “Yeah they’re mercenaries that will take literally any contract”. Who formed it? Where are they based out of? How do they recruit new people? Where do they get the resources to provide all of their men with decent armor and weapons that are comparable to the BoS? These mfrs even had artillery set up in multiple areas, something the BoS never managed
Best part of this is I don’t even know which game you’re talking about. My best guess is Morrowind but honestly Oblivion AND Skyrim are both also valid lmfao
it all depends on which is your first. oldheads love 2 and 3 while newf..s love 4 and 5. idk anyone who actually played 1 when it came out so uhh that i just wont count. its not like soulsborne where it just becomes preference to which iteration of the same formula you like the most. its like asking a new yorker which style of pizza is their favorite, of course theyre gonna pick new york style.
It's funny, no matter the video if it's praising Skyrim or detailing it's weaknesses it still makes me want to go play it again for the 100th time. It just a comfy old blanket that holds so much nostalgia for me I can't help but still love it.
Same here! I agree with a lot of PatricianTV's points and the game has a lot of flaws, but watching this video... I can't help but want to go play Skyrim anyways.
Honestly the only reason I decided to finally watch this was because I was gonna play skyrim but all the mod packs are down. I agree with all these criticisms 100% aware I'll be crawling back to this mess of a game some day 😂
Guilty as charged, I’m playing it as we speak. I’m working through all the side quests after blasting through the main, for the millionth time. I’m already planning my next play through.
@@henrycrabs3497 They probably can have fun. Just not absent-minded fun for a specific game. I am intensely uninterested and even mildly disgusted by CoD. It currently and historically represents just about everything bad about gaming imo. But I get some of the biggest smiles of my life from games like The Cosmic Wheel of Sisterhood.
I think we're misunderstanding what becoming a champion of a deity is supposed to be. Obviously the Dragonborn can't go to the afterlife of any of the Daedra, because their soul is, by default, part of Akatosh, and as such, would return to Akatosh no matter what. Way I understand it, one has to actually dedicate themselves to a particular deity, whereas the protags of the games just contact the Daedric Princes for some immediate profit.
@@georgeoldsterd8994 what about the thieves guild quest line? You clearly pledge yourself to nocturnal also sithis if you join the dark brotherhood then there’s Mora at the end of Dragonborn
The part about the dark brotherhood and Nazir's "less important" contracts didn't even need to be so self-damaging with it's presentation and insistence on being less important. Just establish that Nazir is efficient and Astrid is creative, so the contracts that have weird requirements (Baenlin and the mounted head, Francois Motierre, to draw from oblivion examples) go through Astrid as she pieces together how to satisfy the client's unique requests, while the simple "Just kill him I don't care how it gets done" go through Nazir. His line should be something more like "I'll admit, my contracts aren't as glamorous or as exciting as Astrid's. I handle the simpler jobs that come through. There's plenty of work to be had here, but don't expect a grand elaborate heist." His established attitude even works with the idea that he handles simple and efficient contracts, while his teasing jabs and jokes can be how he copes with how boring the jobs tend to be.
Farkas murders the main character in cold blood and walks away slowly while saying: “You look strong. Come to Jorrvaskr and be a companion” Ah yes, the peak Skyrim experience.
To be fair, if you can get back up to get to jorrvaskr and join the companions after being bludgeoned to death, you're probably reasonably cut out for a warrior faction
I think my peak skyrim moment was when I killed a bunch of thugs, pull the note to see who I pissed off, and see the name "Drayden" or some shit. I have no idea who that is, so I google it. Whatever the name is nothing comes up. So I'm sitting there confused as to who the fuck I need to murder to prove a point, until I go to level up. I was "Drayden" it was me. I hired the hitmen to kill myself. I literally have no idea what I did to trigger this, I'm assuming it was a Mod issue, but that's the most Skyrim thing I've had happen.
The hired thugs trying to kill you can lead to some unintentional silliness. My first encounter with them was leaving Solitude. I was very surprised and it was a tough fight because I was on the highest difficulty (before a patch added a newer highest difficulty). I then read the contract and learned it was the innkeeper I had stayed with. I stole some small consumable (I think a potion?) from my room. I had basically done the equivalent of not paying for those overpriced snacks that some hotels offer, and the innkeep responded with attempted murder.
I vaguely remember doing something similar, I think I misclicked on something and accidentally stole a flower or whatever from a shelf, I dropped it hoping to not get a bounty and the thugs showed up as soon as I left the building. Word gets around fast for a place with no internet.
It feels good to know that my anger and rage about the magic "system" isn't just me. Calling it now that TES6 will have 3 spells per school, and 3 schools total. I see restoration getting phased out and made available to all.
Ever since the first time I listened to this video I come back to hear your magic rant again, it feels liberating to hear someone else understand my pain about magic in skyrim.
Shamus Young had a great point about The Companions. Imagine you are walking down a sidewalk, maybe heading to the bank or something, and there is a road crew doing work on the road. You pass just as they finish and one of the workers runs up to you and says, "some help you were." It's the exact same thing with Aela and the giant fight at the beginning of the game. It's so ridiculous. Bethesda was so terrified of the player missing the Companions in tiny Whiterun that they shoved the faction into the player's face in the dumbest way possible. Then they did it again with the Thieves Guild.
My favorite thing about that is how I got lost the first time I played and ended up in a dungeon before I made it to whiterun. I completely missed the encounter with the companions and the giant. As much as they tried to make it unavoidable, I missed it without even knowing it was a thing until my next character.
Yet this never happens for the College of Winterhold. Sure, every court mage will tell you to check it out, but it is in no way forced on the character like the other 2 main factions. Thanks Todd
I agree but it’s waaaaayyyyy dumber in the case of the thieves guild. Like… dude… it’s the THIEVES guild. Doesn’t it seem like the worst conceivable idea to literally walk up to random strangers and invite them to join your clandestine, secret, underground criminal organization? Like imagine walking into a pizza parlor in New York and some dude is like “ayy you look like you would be really good at intimidations rackets”
Right imagine going into the sewers finding a bar with the bartender that asked you to get an item that was "stolen" and after that gets introduced to a friend that needs help without much detail thrown in just to meet him at a place at a time and you have to get back an item that was stolen from him after which you are told to go to a 3rd place where you are then formerly introduced to the thieves guild with the first two being tests about willingness to break into buildings and second that you can follow orders and instructions and show skill. Rather being walked up on in the town market announcing that I'm here to steal
Killing Astrid was the first thing I tried, and seeing the quest failed text only to be immediately followed by "Destroy the Dark Brotherhood" was the most satisfying thing in the game.
I'd say it's a shame there wasn't more of that kind of stuff, but that quest was rather lackluster, I don't know if they'd have made anything else you could "fail" and start a differing questline for would be any better.
@@Alpine1996 Yup. Totally agree! I hate how they basically force you to be bad guy, or at the very least "The Antihero". And worst part is that it doesnt even matter what you choose in the game, its the cannon lore that states that you end up being connected to daedra. In oblivion you end up taking over Sheogorath's realm, and Dragonborn just becomes Hermeus Mora's new collectable. I hate that!
What I've learned from this video is that typical RPG progression mechanics are fundamentally incompatible with "flexible playstyle" mentality. You can't have enemies get harder over time and give players more damage on their main abilities and then expect them to be successful starting over with something new
You should probably unlearn that because its untrue. Just because Bethesda sucks at conveying the idea doesn't make it a bad one. As an example, if the RPG skills were agglutinative as opposed to exclusionary, avatar strength would scale linearly with player level. If the pool that strength drew from was shared to all skills, strengthening that pool would simply scale everything uniformly (more or less).
@@baronvonbeandipif levelling up your strength also increased your arrow and magic damage than it's already not a *traditional RPG mechanic*, bc the entire point of role playing is making choices about your character progression, and homogenizing it like this would make the choices irrelevant. That's also why flexible playstyles are incompatible with a traditional RPG experience, bc a traditional role play involves you picking a role and playing as it. How often do you see in fiction mages deciding to trade their staff for a bow or warriors deciding to battle with pure magic for a couple fights; not often right, because people don't abandon the skills they've learned for years. The best way you can achieve flexibility is just allowing people to refund their levelling/perks in RPGs that use the traditional system like Fallout, so that you can just take back all the upgrade points and perks you put into and place them into new categories. Though I don't see how this could work with Elder Scrolls levelling system where the skills level up by usage
I think the way STALKER did level scaling was good. Basically an open world FPS, mostly killing humies but also mutant monsters. In the begining areas you're mostly fighting dudes in tracksuits, cuz russian game, and cheap, simple guns. then later one you're fighting experienced fighters with advanced body armour and weapons, and the monsters get more dangerous and numerous too, as well as environmental hazards. So the baseline humans basically don't change, just their gear and tactics, which you can get as well, and the monsters and environment hazards kind of scale up too as you get more experienced with dealing with them, and as an add on there's a story reason for all this too. Felt very natural, and you can always go back and curb stomp the early areas. Heck u can even "downgrade" yourself by changing back your gear to the lower level stuff and see how well you fare with only your new experience on how the game works. Not much reason to actually do this but I loved the games so I just did for fun, which I think is a good sign of a good game
Picture this: The year is 2060. TES6 finally came out in 2043, and now the time has come to look back at it. You and your adult children get together - the whole extended family does, in fact. PatricianTV’s 70 hour analysis is about to release, and the government has decreed that the winter holidays will be extended an extra two weeks (mandatory). You tell the grandkids stories of how you were there at the Oblivion and Skyrim analysis premieres. Maybe you watched the Morrowind videos the moment they first released. It’s gonna be a good 70 hours, you think to yourself.
@@admiraltonydawning3847 Picture this: Todd Howard in his old age has decided, after the contentious relationship with Morrowind fans and their 6 (soon to be 7) fan-ports into other engines (including TES6 and DaggerfallUnity3), to hire PatricianTV as his loremaster and lead supervisor to balance out retaining the old guard-- now several generations deep of Morrowind fans-- with pulling in new audiences with modernized action RPG mechanics and plots. You learn this fact from a cameo by old man Todd in the last 30 seconds of this 70 hours epic.
Got to the bit about the werewolfs-THANK YOU! It was always so irritating to have a nord warrior character having to abandon the nord warrior afterlife to play the nord warrior questline
yeah it's kind of weird how shallow the warrior questline is for the game that is rather warrior oriented. I mean heck the primary antagonists are just reskinned bandits but with silver swords and alchemy ingredients. there *might* have been cut content that would have made the silver hand more interesting. But nothing came of it.
@Victoria Thorson Based. Too many redditoids polluting everything with their repugnant jargon. They're already coping and seething after being found out.
The whole series should be mandatory viewing for *the whole* staff. They should watch it as a group and argue over the points he makes for a week or two straight.
@@baronvonbeandip I think it’s mostly important the senior designers and leads watch the videos. I’d say emil in particular needs to watch these but we all know how he deals with criticism, so i’m not holding my breath that any of this will get through to the person who needs to hear it most lmao. Really it just makes me sad that a series with as much untapped potential as the goddamn elder scrolls has to languish as a result of devs who decided long ago that dumbing down the game’s systems to the point where character role play wasn’t even really viable anymore was the best way to sell more copies. The worst thing is that it did, and went on to bolster their highly flawed ideas about about what players wanted from their games. They kept taking meaningful stuff out under the pretense of keeping things simple. Now we have starfield, a game with so few meaningful mechanics to engage with that it’s not really anything special to anyone. It just exists in this lame state of being kind of alright at everything. Idk, hopefully some senior Bethesda devs played baldur’s gate or something and had a come to Jesus moment about how shallow their modern “RPG” games are by comparison. The future of elder scrolls is looking grim quite honestly.
@@Gamernutritionfacts Honestly none of that matters if they insist on using a game engine that's one of, if not the worst, in the industry. I have never played games that feel worse to play than Bethesda games. Your character feels like a floating camera with zero feedback. The gunplay in starfield is just.. wow. They should teach college game development classes about how not to make a video game feel good to play and use Bethesda games as an example.
@@beeman4266At least the older titles were RPGs where you could kinda get away with it. The closer it comes to action adventure, the more obvious the engine flaws are.
The whole series (Morrowind, Oblivion, both Skyrim and Starfield videos) should be mandatory viewing for Todd and Emil especially. A lot of the problems with the later games come down to their direction and writing respectively.
1:31:52 the difference between kicking in dark messiah, and shield bashing in Skyrim is that dark messiah does the most damage with environmental hazards. They're not just kicking to stunlock, they're kicking them into spikes, drops, traps, or other enemies. In Skyrim, the environment is rarely a factor at all, other than line of sight.
I disagree, my brothers and I were using the unrelenting force shout to throw people off cliffs or down a slope to do a lot of damage to them. Obviously this is mostly outdoors fighting, and with enemies that can get ragdolled. I think that the environment is a factor in skyrim.
@@davidreeding9176 except when they just happen to bounce down the terrain mesh in such a way that they never actually fall enough to trigger the fall damage, because the velocity based damage never works properly. It was fun for about five minutes the first time I tried though.
@@davidreeding9176 How can the environment can be a factor in Skyrim's combat if it can be utilized with only a single dragon shout and a select number of preset dungeon traps? You're unlikely to be fighting next to cliffs for roughly at least 80% of the game as well, so whatever factor all of this brings is so insignificant that it might as well just not exist.
@@superplayerex2431 shouting an archer off of a tower, for example, or shoving a person down a cliff. These are things you can do. I should've said that the environment CAN be a factor instead of saying it is a factor. However, my point still stands. If there is an enemy next to a cliff, you can shout them off of it, and maybe the game decides if that does damage to them or not.
@@davidreeding9176 Yeah, but just because these are things you can do does not mean they even remotely suffice as a factor in combat significant enough to make it a good point towards the game. Just look at Dark Messiah's kick and how it is a nearly essential tool in your arsenal with various practical uses in combat that has significant impact not only because of those uses, but also because the environment is actively shaped to give it use. This is not the same for Skyrim whatsoever. Vast majority of your combat encounters will be on flat ground with pretty much zero environmental hazards to use against your enemies. So, once again, whatever depth environmental hazards have in Skyrim is incredibly shallow to the point that they might as well have not existed in the first place. I've done whole playthroughs of the game where I never shouted or used any hazards to my advantage because there's just no incentive for it and the combat itself is so simple, there's no reason to bother. Like another commenter mentioned before, the whole "shouting crowds of enemies off a cliff" thing is only funny for about five minutes before you entirely forget it even exists in the game.
The Way We Look at Things You should know this, Timothy, that in the last days there will be very difficult times. -2 Timothy 3:1 Someone said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. A Christian worldview will affect the way that we see everything. And why is this important? Because we are living in the last days. Jesus Christ is coming back again. And if ever there was a time when we need to know our Bibles and have a close walk with Christ, the time is now. Describing the end times, the apostle Paul said, “In the last days there will be very difficult times. For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred. They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control” (2 Timothy 3:1-3) Paul went on to say, “They will be cruel and hate what is good. They will betray their friends, be reckless, be puffed up with pride, and love pleasure rather than God. They will act religious, but they will reject the power that could make them godly” (verses 3-5) Is that not an accurate assessment of the times in which we are living? The United States has never been more spiritual yet more immoral. We throw the word spiritual around a lot. But do we know what it means? We live in an age when we can write our own apps and customize our home screens. We can keep the stuff we like and throw out the things we don’t. And we carry that thinking into other aspects of our lives. The result is something called moral relativism. Moral relativism is the belief that there are no absolutes. There is no right or wrong. Moral relativism teaches that we are all products of the evolutionary process and not made by a Creator God. There is no devil. There is no good or evil. And there is no plan or purpose for our lives. Moral relativism also teaches that we are all basically good, and if we happen to go bad, then it’s because we’re simply products of our environment. It teaches that we make our own truth. For instance, if you believe in a God of love, forgiveness, and mercy, you can keep that. But if you’re offended by the biblical teaching of a God of holiness, righteousness, and judgment, you can delete that. It works out perfectly. Or so it seems. Moral relativism may sound fine in theory. But what if we were to put it into practice? Will a god of our own making be able to save us in the final day? Of course not. A biblical worldview says there is a God as revealed in the Bible, and the Bible alone is the authority and source of that belief. It is not what we feel or what is popular, acceptable, or perceived as cool. It is what the Bible says.
@@austinbevis4266 it’s a random drop, I’ve found it in every odd nook and cranny from random chests in the wild to inside dungeon chests. It’s like a clingy ex who won’t get over the fact you dumped them.
The Hired Thug event is funny because I stole nothing and eventually it fired anyway. And it was the Hagraven you end up drunkenly marrying. Me and my sister searched for ages to find this character only to get a hilarious reveal once we were on that drunk daedra quest
aye thats Moira she sends thugs after you if you steal from or kill anise in anise's cabin. the cabin just across the river from the guardian stones. Anise is Moira's sister.
I feel my bones trying to escape my skin every time I hear Emil Pagliarulo say “great American novel” which is often because I constantly watch this video
I felt your rage on the magic system man, Bethesda is like a pizza place that sells the best pizza dough of all time, but they are to lazy to make the other ingredients good since the dough sells so well, so the rest of the ingredients are literally human feces, so you go buy dough and make the rest of the pizza by yourself in your house with mods.
They need someone like Obsidian to handle the story and dialog for them for the elder scrolls games like Obsidian did for Fallout New Vegas. Just focus on the world design
@@belhariry Obsidian is a terrible company now, and they will not help in any way shape or form. I would rather play Fallout 4, again, then have to sit through the slog fest that is Outerworlds. "We get it, you're a communist"
1:13:20 It reminds me of a Tumblr post that someone made a while ago, where they pointed out that Bethesda's "environmental storytelling" is usually just placing a dead body somewhere and placing a note on it that's like, "Oh, no, I've been murdered!"
Reminds me of the one cave that drained the life energy of anyone who was in it, and some guy kept a journal with entries spanning several days right up to the point of death about he was starving, thirsty and so weak he couldn't lift his arm... yet he was writing that in perfect handwriting at the same time, instead of just crawling his dumbass out of the cave to fucking survive and escape it's draining touch.
A better example would be the Wooden Mask you can find at the Dragon Priest summit, its subtlely implied that the Thalmor were after the Khonarik Golden Dragon Priest Mask and made a time-travelling mask to find it, but his bodyguards killed him in suspicion.
05:21:48 God, this section about the nonexistence of Bethesda-like open world RPGs with actually good magic systems from other devs just absolutely broke my heart. Been feeling that pain since 2008. We need other devs to pick up the torch Bethsoft threw in the trash, just like with PDX interactive.
Dragon's Dogma came out 7 months after Skyrim and being a Sorcerer in that us awesome. Meteors, tornado, lightning whip, ice tendrils, ect. Can't wait for DD2.
I found Riften so funny during my playthrough. I'll be honest, my initial reaction was pretty positive. I thought that having a crooked guard try to swindle you as you enter was a nice touch and a good first impression for the "Thieves Guild City." Then all that goodwill was instantly lost when I actually entered and five separate NPC's approached me to announce how much they *love* crime It's a great example of media undermining itself by lacking all restraint. They couldn't just drop a big hint that this town had crime and corruption, they had to go so over the top with it that it swings back into absurdity
Genuinely so much of Riften's intrigue could have been saved by just having the talk about the thieves guild be prompted by the player talking to someone saying "hey i almost got mugged by the guards" and then the thieves guild gets introduced. After the player starts asking around Brynolf comes up to them and starts asking them if they're interested in actually joining the guild or if they're going to have a problem
The Way We Look at Things. You should know this, Timothy, that in the last days there will be very difficult times. -2 Timothy 3:1 Someone said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. A Christian worldview will affect the way that we see everything. And why is this important? Because we are living in the last days. Jesus Christ is coming back again. And if ever there was a time when we need to know our Bibles and have a close walk with Christ, the time is now. Describing the end times, the apostle Paul said, “In the last days there will be very difficult times. For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred. They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control” (2 Timothy 3:1-3) Paul went on to say, “They will be cruel and hate what is good. They will betray their friends, be reckless, be puffed up with pride, and love pleasure rather than God. They will act religious, but they will reject the power that could make them godly” (verses 3-5) Is that not an accurate assessment of the times in which we are living? The United States has never been more spiritual yet more immoral. We throw the word spiritual around a lot. But do we know what it means? We live in an age when we can write our own apps and customize our home screens. We can keep the stuff we like and throw out the things we don’t. And we carry that thinking into other aspects of our lives. The result is something called moral relativism. Moral relativism is the belief that there are no absolutes. There is no right or wrong. Moral relativism teaches that we are all products of the evolutionary process and not made by a Creator God. There is no devil. There is no good or evil. And there is no plan or purpose for our lives. Moral relativism also teaches that we are all basically good, and if we happen to go bad, then it’s because we’re simply products of our environment. It teaches that we make our own truth. For instance, if you believe in a God of love, forgiveness, and mercy, you can keep that. But if you’re offended by the biblical teaching of a God of holiness, righteousness, and judgment, you can delete that. It works out perfectly. Or so it seems. Moral relativism may sound fine in theory. But what if we were to put it into practice? Will a god of our own making be able to save us in the final day? Of course not. A biblical worldview says there is a God as revealed in the Bible, and the Bible alone is the authority and source of that belief. It is not what we feel or what is popular, acceptable, or perceived as cool. It is what the Bible says.
Coming back to listen this fantastic video while working my construction My only critique is that cookbooks aren’t really modern, we have cookbooks from the early medieval period, and many Roman cookbooks as well.
The concept of a recipe is as ancient as human civilization and the advent of fire, so it's a wild point to call a cookbook a modern invention. Tameriel has had written history for hundreds of years a cookbook is not outlandish it's odd there's not more cookbooks, like a compendium of all those alchemy recipe notes. It would be a cool quest to collect recipes for an alchemist trying to pen one even.
same i don't care about the game and won't even pirate it but i'm waiting to see if it comes out at all so patrician tv can make a 30 hour any % speedrun analysis
The fact that it works like that bothers the hell out of me. Luckily the alternate start mod Skyrim Unbound has an option so dragons spawn x in-game days after the beginning of the game regardless of what you do. Even cooler, you start the main quest by killing one of them on your own and dynamically finding out you're the dragonborn when you absorb its soul. It's such a cool change.
I never realized the potential of Skyrim VR until I saw the footage of you waking up Mirabelle Ervine, groveling at the statue of Meridia, and slapping the orc who was talking in the middle of Malacath's speech. I've watched your Morrowind and Oblivion retrospectives multiple times start to finish, thanks for another 20 hours of entertainment.
Tbh with certain mods like Spellsiphon, magic feels so good in SkyrimVR and the melee combat works well enough that you can still be a little campy. Absolutely my favorite way to play Skyrim
@@Guitar-Dog patrician wasn’t kidding when he said that despite collaborating closely with Private sessions and holding a similar philosophy/style, they take very different approaches to their videos on the game. I can confidently second the recommendation
Even after watching this video, i still decided to play Skyrim recently. I took a 2 year break from the game. Even with all its flaws, there's just something about the game that pulls me back in.
Well, it was my first Bethesda game. I had never played a game with so much freedom. But i have to admit that I stopped playing again because after i finished Fallout New Vegas, I realize how shallow the game actually is.
I find it weird that Emil had that speech where he talks about people "Ripping the pages out of your great novel and making paper airplanes with them" When it was the acknowledgement from the audience on his Dark Brotherhood storyline in Oblivion that made him so important in Bethesda
@@Rannos22 Yeah it is. Actually I really like Skyrim's graphics even now. It has a very consistent art style, and everything is modeled quite well. It is a huge step up from Morrowind, and especially Oblivion. Might not be bleeding edge anymore, but Its a far cry of being butt ugly, like many games of its generation.
My first contact with the companions: 1.Get yelled at for not helping 2.Enter Building with 2 people fighting 3.Use my heal spell which seemed to bug them out, they draw their weapon and go on a rampage 4.About 5 people are now dead
The very first time I tried the thieves guild questline, at Golden Glow while in the apiary, a dragon attacked, landed on the fence and blasted all the beehives in a single breath. A fucking dragon attacks and destroys this business' vital assets within spitting distance of Riften and Mercer has no clue and acts like its all my fault?
On the one hand, as dragonborn, the PC would be one of the people who could believably use that excuse. On the other, I'm just imagining the dovahkin constantly going "a dragon ate my homework" and I am inordinately amused by the thought.
Listening to this a second (or third) time I'm actually writing down notes about game and magic system design. I want to make my own game at some point, and these videos are invaluable research and feedback
Thanks to some finicky looseness on the definition of what "casting a spell" means, you can become Archmage without having ever cast a spell yourself. The least educated Dragonborn can just pick up a couple staves or scrolls and be hailed as the new Archmage.
@@731freeman I wouldn't call the Oblivion Mage's Guild questline "good" exactly, but it at the very least actually tries to replicate what being a student of magic would be like. In fact that's what most of the questlines in Oblivion are: lacking in objective quality, but you can at least tell there was real effort put in and there ARE good ideas there. Unlike Skyrim's quests.
Best part about the Companions quest line is that you can tell off Aela when you first meet her after the giant fight and she'll still invite you to join them anyways. She's the original Preston Garvey, no matter what you say she still adds the quest to your journal.
"Yeah i know i swore my undying soul to nocturnal. But this dragon soul is mine and thats the onr you get" Nevermind the fact that the dragonborn has a fragment of akatosh or lorkhan as a soul and that isnt really his to bargain with
@@gewuerzwanze5627plus for a lot of Daedra you never directly promise your soul to them. It's just "Mortal, I need ya to do me a favor. In exchange I'll give you an artifact of mine". No worship attached.
The problem with this game is you hardly ever go to the sky. Not even the rim of it. So the game already lies to you on that alone. At least Morrowind had a lot of wind storms and other wind related things.
Not only was the wind today, but it was also on the morrow. Also with fatigue if you ran and jumped very far and were attacked you would go 'Far, then fell'.
The frightening thought is there will be at least one person who reads the comment above & nods along without irony, rather than dismissing it as the equivalent of someone scratching "For a good time, call" on a bathroom stall.
I recall a post about Todd Howard being in chess club, model UN, debate club, and Tennis or something. With a caption along the lines of: "No wonder he thinks it's acceptable to be master of all guilds and factions". Just something rewatching this series has made me remember
11:17 I just wanna highlight that during the cart sequence, you still haven't made your character, so it would be either very immersion breaking to have the player see them as another character, only to have to morph into whatever character you wish minutes later.
It's because Ralof is actually talking to the player. That's why you can't respond except with gestures. That's why Doki Doki Literature wholesale copied Skyrim's formula with the character Monika.
The craziest thing about the Companions isn’t just that they force you to become a werewolf. But when you first turn, the game *expects* you to go kill random Whiterun civilians to test out your powers. Like, these guys are supposed to be mercenaries that defend the city. And they just let you loose to go kill innocent people? Why not have the player character go on a werewolf rampage in the silver hand base? Or better yet, have the silver hand attack on Jorvaskyr happen much earlier in the questline minus the slaying of Kodlak that way the newbie player character Companion can prove himself further by testing his werewolf skills on people who actually deserve it and thus protecting the home of the Companions while doing so. Skyrim is the only game where the heroic warrior factions make you feel more like a scumbag rather than a hero
I remember way back on release when I first did that quest, I did go on a rampage not thinking much of it. Only during that killing spree, Belethor happened to be leaving his shop and aggroed, and I killed him during the scene, which meant he was dead for good after the transformation ended. Which meant that, until Ysolda decided to take up the mantel, I just didn't have access to the Whiterun general store for a non-insignificant amount of time. Hell, instead of rampaging in the city, they could have had an underground training area that they used for the new Werewolfs to get the hang of their powers while also not potentially harming innocent people during it.
You don't need to go on The rampage, you just need to wait for like 5min. With you do that they will Say "Many of Us don't have the luck to not go on a bloodbath on your first night as a werewolf"
@@samfire3067 yeah so basically, the game still expects you to go kill random npcs because the Companions will have special dialogue just in case you decide not to 😭
@@samfire3067 I think the point still stands that they know a newly turned werewolf is generally inclined toward a blood rage and left you in the middle of a town to go through it. Even if you can just stand in place, the Companions are impressed that you didn't slaughter the people they put you in a position to slaughter.
Are you guys dumb? Did you not read the 3 lines of dialogue before the blood ritual? The whole point of the night of the transformation is to RP how you would act as a werewolf (either rampage or just leave the city) and you get a dialogue acording to your choice. We know thanks to Aela that some werewolves can control themselves and others just go feral. Just because you're smoothbrained and need to click every red dot on map for a dopamine release doesn't mean the game is badly designed. If this sort of roleplaying option was on morrowind you guys would praise it 😂.
I've never even played any Elder Scrolls games, I'm just using this to try to get through my shifts stocking shelves so I don't go crazy from the monotony. It's a lot easier when you have a huge piece of content like this.
It's so hard for players to agree on skyrims intentions, themes, history, and thought process, because it was so hard for the developers to do the same
One idea that I've seen to make the companions questline much better deals with the silver hand being a group that split off from the companions after the circle became werewolves. That the silver hand stayed true to Ysgramor and their nordic heritage by rebelling against lycanthropy and trying to find the pieces of wuthraad to honor Ysgramor. This would've added so much depth and maybe you could've even joined the silver hand to return the companions guild to their former glory, rather than being forced to become a werewolf.
I really like this idea. Such a simple concept that might not have taken much time to incorporate into the factions quest line. And as you said it would add so much depth to the companions, along with providing an interesting way to have a meaningful interaction with the silver hand.
@@himynameis3664 I wouldn't say that would be a quick or easy add. You would need to make new quests (even if they are just radiant quests featuring wolfs and maybe a werewolf), a comparable number of voice lines, unless Bethesda wanted to be super lazy they would need the town to have opinions on the Silver Hand killing and replacing the local guild. Add this to Patrician's theory that the werewolf stuff was added late and they were already ignorant enough about denying becoming a werewolf. Some fans could probably do a barebones version of it. Or a really good version depending on voice acting and the ability to avoid breaking the game by killing the Companions.
@@himynameis3664 It most likely would have taken a LOT of time to implement. Knowing Bethesda’s writing process, they would not only add more depth to the Silver Hand (in this case completely reworking who they are, creating more characters and needing more voice lines) but would also dehumanize and strip depth from the Companions. As cool as it would be for the Dragonborn to have to choose between a no-nonsense guild of werewolf hunters or a community-bound guild of werewolf warriors, The Elder Scrolls isn’t really known for their ability to create dynamic, impactful, and difficult choices. I may be wrong but I believe this idea came from Fudge Muppet and is honestly a very good idea. However the fact that the Silver Hand in game is just a bandit faction with silver weapons proves Bethesda either did not have time or simply didnt care
And you know what? Kodlack DOES NOT like being a ware wolf in the end. He actively wants to un-lycanthrope himself, and silver hand respect him for this. Maybe silver hand and circle were at peace because both respect Kodlack. Then mid point in quest Kodlack dies because and this causes Sliver hand and Companions to go war. The war is about who gets to do what to body. Circle wants to burn him in Skyforge so his body strengthens their weapons while Silver hand want to un-lycanthrope Kodlack and show everyone in Skyrim that Circle are ware wolfs.
Loving this video so far, but I did wanna say at around 7:16:00 that there is actually evidence of Hert and Hern killing travelers, they have a small butchery shed where if I can remember correctly, there's normal animal corpses, a troll skull, and also a human skull. I wanna say it was bloody too but I'd have to go back to look honestly. Nitpick aside I really do love this video, and as someone who's favorite run of the game was a pure mage I feel incredibly validated by your rant on magick in Skyrim lol. I had fun in vanilla with it but kinda like you I had more fun as a mage once I started exploiting. I did the jail armor exploit to equip multiple sets of armor and enchanted gear to decrease all my magicka costs to 0, which was incredibly fun once I got the master level lightning spell since I could down dragons so quickly with it. Love your video though ! Can't wait to watch the second part once I finish this behemoth of a video.
"there are no priests of nocturnal" "what if the other priests find out we're not really priests?" accidentally setting up a hilarious situation where every priest of nocturnal is afraid that the other priests will find out they're not really a priest of nocturnal
Nobody's going to see this, but I just wanted to point out that Jyrik's staff is not ONLY a lightning staff with a restoration staff's model, but also casts a unique version of the lightning spell that no other weapon in the game can cast. Usually lightning weapons deal X damage to health and half as much to magicka; Jyrik's staff deals X damage to health and TWICE as much to magicka, making it surprisingly strong against other magic users - including dragons.
Hey you thought no one would see this, but I, another magic player, did! I also wanted to point this out. Jyrik's staff is like a baby staff of magnus depending on when you get it, and it remains somewhat useful throughout the questline and definitely helps with morokei whenever you happen to fight him at a point where dragon priests are actually a threat.
My first Skyrim playthrough was a magic playthrough and it also put me into the Skyrim Limbo that I don't think ive ever woken up from... Very cool, wish it was told to the player. Wish I had some resource that could tell me all the unique unlisted weapon effects... maybe some kind of sheet that I could spread out and look at...
I hate skyrim for what it’s done to TES and bethesda games as a whole, the fact that it, in my opinion, ruined the lore around skyrim, made the gameplay formula even more shallow and boring than the previous games, and everything else. But I will never deny that I have fun playing the game, wandering around as a stealth archer and just completely turning my brain off for hours at a time as I just complete objectives and wander the scenery. It’s a very relaxing game and come back to it periodically
52:09 "Morrowind and Oblivion may have both started their fighter's factions with a rat quest, but Skyrim finishes its fighter's faction with infinite rat quests." This really sums up Skyrim's quantity-over-quality ethos.
Something about seeing "A Quick Retrospective" for a 9 hour video that is just part 1 of a two part series, for some reason fills my heart with immeasurable amount of joy.
Your Elder Scrolls retrospectives helped me get through three months of hospital last November. Now, a year later, I get to look back at that time and enjoy a new instalment of your wonderful series. Thank you very much Pat!
Ya know what would've been an interesting climax of the college of winterhold questline? Using magic to raise the collapsed parts of winterhold from the sea, which opens up another side quest (or side questline) where you help rebuild winterhold.
Honestly, that's a cool idea, imagine if it gave you boons like a farm where what alchemy resources you cultivate give you like x4 the normal amount, so plucking a 1 nirnroot gives you 4, and so on.
I have thought about that too. Well rebuilding Winter hold and gaining the respect of the people that live there. It would make sense to have a quest like that, considering the damage the College did to the village.
The writers truly do hate magic, as evidenced by their total lack of considering it as a factor for anything other than a get out of jail free card when they make a writing mistake. Never is it a consideration in quest design. Clairvoyance to solve a riddle? No. Using the HEALING school of magic to HEAL SOMEONE in the MAGICAL faction? Of course not. No invisibility tie ins, no conjuring the dead. But you better believe Bethesda will use magic to hand wave away plot holes when convenient. I remember the first time I played Skyrim, I thought that sure the Conjuration school would provide me a horse, because what other convenience would be more obvious? Surely it isn't ALL combat summons. This is before dawnguard came and added a horse, but even then, why should I need to do a quest for one of the most basic necessities a mage would care for?
What gets me most about the companions is that when you transform for the first time, you're supposed to go on a rampage of Whiterun and kill a bunch of people before the companions manage to stop you. And when you return to Whiterun afterwards? There's not a single fucking thing in the entire 'city', not even a line from an NPC or a fucking notice on a wall somewhere, that even suggests a werewolf went rampaging through the cloud district and murdering a bunch of people. Not a SINGLE THING. The game reacted to this so poorly that for like 5 years I literally thought it was a dream sequence and didn't actually happen. But no. It did happen. Not only this, but it's suggested to have happened before with Farkas and probably others, and yet no-one in Whiterun seems to remember the fact that on multiple instances Werewolves have suddenly come out of Jorvaskr and started tearing people apart. Lmao.
There’s also the exit to the countryside outside the walls of Whiterun too. There should’ve been dialogue acknowledging how the player handled the immediate influx of a ton of power in the form of your werewolf form. One line would be about a werewolf tearing through Whiterun and, hopefully add some extra NPC’s and guards set to a low level to sell the power the player just gained, then have a separate line you can hear radiantly off a werewolf roaming the countryside.
On a sidenote, can we talk about how Whiterun is home to several daedric artifacts by the time we arrive and after we're done? You've already got the Ebony Blade up in Dragons reach, just collecting dust in the basement. And then the Companions are hoarding a small shrine basically dedicated to Hircine under the Skyforge. And then we proceed to collect more relics of Hircine near the altar. How is Whiterun not more cursed?
@@puppykitten4779 You can literally just stand there behind the hall and nobody comes after you, nobody can see you. I just sit there and wait till the transformation ends, every time.
When I saw the video length I thought this was going to be a bunch of filler and just recounting questlines without saying anything of substance, but no, it's actually 9 hours of thoughtful critique and commentary, very good work. Also massively agree with the anti-fast travel sentiment - even if fast traveling is "optional" as many say, games that are built with fast travel in mind have no reason to make the world compelling enough to traverse by foot. People think they want fast travel because we get lazy open-world games, but we get lazy open-world games because of fast travel.
One of the first times I played this game; I realized it gave me the option of fast traveling to helgen. Simply wait until Alduin is far enough away while you’re chilling in the tower with ulfric, and you can fast travel outside the gate. Of course, your hands are still bound but hey, you escaped
I went through the entire transformation arc of starting off as a proud and upright mage, to becoming a stealth mage, to using a conjured bow to be technically still a mage while acting as a full blown stealth archer. It was harrowing.
Skyrim is the most face-value writing. No intrigue, no subversion, and certainly no love of its lore. The game frustrates me to no end, and when you got angry about magic, I was right there with you. I held the same exact complaints for years, especially since I went into Skyrim in 2011 planning to play a mage. I play a warrior in Daggerfall, a spellsword in Morrowind, and an archer in Oblivion- I wanted Skyrim to be my mage. Nope.
The rant about how garbage pure magic builds are in Skyrim was nice to hear. They're not just badly balanced, they're very poorly designed. It was so obvious they didn't expect people to not use a melee weapon of some kind even as a mage.
The only exception is using a cloak spell then using invisibility so you slowwwwwwwly damage everything but they can't see you so they just stand there slowly dying.
@@UsingGorillaLogic It i not about being fast, the problem that you have to chees it, if it was fast it would be bad. As Patricion said, the magic too weak or too strong nothing in between.
The only time i had fun with a pure mage build was when i installed mods that -increased the number of equippable rings - added spells that enabled me to turn full soulstones into empty ones of the next higher tier - changed charging spell animations - had fully functional dragon wings. - added time dilation spells. And changed that wards worked like shields in addition to reducing magic damage.
It's ungodly impressive how a 9 hour video can get a million views in a month, I'm already 1 hour in and it feels like only 10 minutes have passed. I mean all of this as a compliment.
It's not often though of but people tend to go to longer vids cause they can return and rewatch parts and put more faith in longer vids cause well they gotta have it that long for a reason right?
I prefer long videos that have something to say, as you can listen for ages with little imput until you feel the need to comment and interact; over short videos that throw out little content and require you to search for something else, or that you have to watch 3 times before finishing your comment.
That’s because his arguments are so meandering and without narrative consequences. It’s like a 10th grader who hasn’t read the book: his report is kinda pointless, full of repetitions and dead ends.
I think the reason so few people mention how you're not given the option to not become a werewolf, is because they knew the game had crappy stories, and just being railroaded into the decision was just something they were already prepared to go along with. It's not that people were too stupid to notice. It's that people were too jaded to care. "This plot line makes me become a werewolf? Well, alright I guess. I'm sure I'll have the option to cure it down the line because Skyrim never makes you commit to your choices."
I remember being confused by the charcoal/paper thing in the Thieves Guild quest because it was so out of character for the rest of the game. Skyrim had never asked me to solve a puzzle, so I was absolutely stuck when it suddenly dropped a vague hint instead of a clear quest marker. (and of course I couldn't be completely sure it wasn't just a bug)
I bet someone at Bethesda genuinely forgot to put that quest marker in, or a bug prevented it appearing in the game and nobody at Bethesda has fixed it since. There are so few examples of a puzzle like this one (albeit extremely simple) in this entire game! It's bizarre. It's a shame the puzzles in these games are withering away.
For the Dark Brotherhood quest where you kill the vampire couple, the cabin a bit away from the house contains skulls and bloody rags, showing they've been killing travelers
if you talk to the wife she very not-so-subtly hints that too: "Other people just make things complex. Out here, Hern and I can get everything we need from the occasional traveler."
At least it feels more alive than Morrowind. I love Morrowind but damn it feels so dead static npcs, walls of text (I don’t mind too much but it can be a bit overwhelming sometimes), while Morrowind does a lot of things right I feel less immersed cause there’s usually only a handful of interesting things to see. Compare that to Oblivion when you randomly come across an oblivion gate or in Skyrim when you see that gigantic distant ruin and people in the town talk about it
@@brycekrispiez714 Yeah, the best course of action would have been to have all the good things integrated from all games, but I'm sure there is a myriad of things against that idea, seeing how massive these games tend to be; although Obsidian managed to do great world building in 18 months, so it is hard to say how much is bad management and incompetence.
I have to bring this up. I think it was Tim Cain who explained that when one of the other members of Black Isle took Fallout home and play tested it, they told him that they wanted to see more than just numbers going up when they levelled up. That was the true origin of the perk system, apparently. And the concept of horizontal progression. I have a difficult time believing that a mod that is essentially nothing but numbers going up every level would do anything to improve the game. Being able to choose a perk like being able to pickpocket people whilst you are standing right in front of them and nobody else notices (which is how real pickpockets work) would be a real improvement.
I feel like his glancing over the ordinator perk mod was pretty basic. Honestly there's tons of really interesting perks for all the skills. The conjuration tree alone was the basis for my last playthrough as "King Of Bones" and all its relevant perks let me make a small skeleton army. The melee trees add a ton of new ways to use those fighting styles even if it does boil down to additional ways of doing damage. Still worth checking out for sure though. Ordinator revitalized Skyrim for me.
The Aventus Aretino problem could have been solved by just having the rumor be "Hey, did you hear about that kid who ran away from that otphanage? Wonder where he went", making it possible that by the time you find him he had just begun performing the Black Sacrament. But I guess they had to dangle that Dark Brotherhood story right in front of the players' face to slap them with it.
And they got way worse at doing that in Fallout 4, start you in the corner of the map with only 1 direction then make it impossible to miss dogmeat, you felt like you earned him in FO3, bethesda are getting worse at rewarding the player for simply buying a game from them.
The Way We Look at Things You should know this, Timothy, that in the last days there will be very difficult times. -2 Timothy 3:1 Someone said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. A Christian worldview will affect the way that we see everything. And why is this important? Because we are living in the last days. Jesus Christ is coming back again. And if ever there was a time when we need to know our Bibles and have a close walk with Christ, the time is now. Describing the end times, the apostle Paul said, “In the last days there will be very difficult times. For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred. They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control” (2 Timothy 3:1-3) Paul went on to say, “They will be cruel and hate what is good. They will betray their friends, be reckless, be puffed up with pride, and love pleasure rather than God. They will act religious, but they will reject the power that could make them godly” (verses 3-5) Is that not an accurate assessment of the times in which we are living? The United States has never been more spiritual yet more immoral. We throw the word spiritual around a lot. But do we know what it means? We live in an age when we can write our own apps and customize our home screens. We can keep the stuff we like and throw out the things we don’t. And we carry that thinking into other aspects of our lives. The result is something called moral relativism. Moral relativism is the belief that there are no absolutes. There is no right or wrong. Moral relativism teaches that we are all products of the evolutionary process and not made by a Creator God. There is no devil. There is no good or evil. And there is no plan or purpose for our lives. Moral relativism also teaches that we are all basically good, and if we happen to go bad, then it’s because we’re simply products of our environment. It teaches that we make our own truth. For instance, if you believe in a God of love, forgiveness, and mercy, you can keep that. But if you’re offended by the biblical teaching of a God of holiness, righteousness, and judgment, you can delete that. It works out perfectly. Or so it seems. Moral relativism may sound fine in theory. But what if we were to put it into practice? Will a god of our own making be able to save us in the final day? Of course not. A biblical worldview says there is a God as revealed in the Bible, and the Bible alone is the authority and source of that belief. It is not what we feel or what is popular, acceptable, or perceived as cool. It is what the Bible says.
Regarding the conversation about Ulfric as a "Stormcloak asset": my interpretation upon discovering this dossier wasn't that Ulfric was a ally, former or otherwise, of the Thalmor. Rather, his existence is useful to the Thalmor, and while Ulfric's goals are separate from whatever the Aldmeri Dominion might be pursuing, the manner in which he is attempting to achieve those goals is very convenient for Thalmor purposes. Not a direct agent, but still a pawn.
But in the same times it is saying that they don't want a Stormcloak victory, so I think they are really just for a prolonged conflict and nothing else. Basicly Ulfric is usefull if he couldn't win or too strong to lose, if the balance broken the Thalmor is in a bad situation.
@@reactiondavant-garde3391 Right, but as long as that balance isn't broken (and before the Last Dragonborn shows up, there's no sign that it will be), Ulfric simply being alive helps the Thalmor out.
I am actually surprised Pat never guessed that out. That's the first thing that comes up in mind when you read "an asset". Because that takes like three seconds of logical conclusions to get to the point you've made. Pat sometimes is so bad it's just not even funny.
@@kommandantwunder6785 I mean Patrician made this point just doesn't made in this form, when he say that the unresolved Civil War is good for the Thalmor he makeing this exact point.
The talk about realism in the leveling is a good point. So many people complain about "realism" or "realistic" but forget that those terms are tied to the reality of what you are describing! In Skyrim, it is realistic to need defenses against monsters. Helms Reach is literally a building designed to trap a dragon. There are spells designed to turn undead. These were realistic problems that the world addressed. It is a fair thing to bring up when there is an obvious, realistic solution in world to a problem, that is just ignored. Because that is stupid. Like the fact it isn't realistic that the silence spell... doesn't exist. That would be insanely useful and is already something that exists in lore. Regarding the skills, it is always about being consistent with the ideas in the world. If the world has people who train for decades to master a skill, than why not have the player be required to use those skills to improve. Personally, it is one of the more interesting ideas Skyrim and the Elder Scrolls uses, since it can make a character feel like they are growing as you play more gradually. The downside is the representations of that growth are shockingly small. If anything, the system itself isn't bad, it is just very poorly implemented and shallow to accurately portray the scale of the game.
Funny thing that happened yo me in my firat playthrough of the thieves guild: So i kill Mercer and the place is flooding, Karliah and whats-his-name are going all like, "well this is the end" but then i, pretending to be my character, say "Yeah about that, I kinda have a dragon priest mask that lets me breathe under water soooo, fuck you guys!" Then i went under water to equip the mask. However, upon looking into my inventory, the mask was not there, I had left the mask at home. So i slowly come back up to the water surface and go, "Heyyy guyyysss... so about earlier.", then my brother who was watching me play pretended to be one of them shouting, "KILL HIM." and then the exit opened up. Was very funny and i still look back to that time as a fun moment playing skyrim.
The mod "Serana Dialog Add-on" gives her dialog after the Companions werewolf bit where she calls them all terrible people for hazing you into a daedric ritual with Hircine and then angrily refuses to take part in some of the other quests and waits outside. Of course makes sense for her character to be angry seeing because of how she became a vampire. Unfortunately the mod still has to work within the confines of Skyrim's vanilla quests so she doesn't get to the point where she gets so mad she leaves, but I thought it was nice seeing that some mod authors agree with you about that moment being nonsensical in-story.
@@lillycline1414 I enjoyed her character from what I remember, but I really don't like how the mod devolves into full on fan fiction where she gets way too obsessed with the player character. Also her not marrying the player character was a choice by the writers that I feel was a correct one to fit her character.
Thanks to everyone tuning in.
ANCIENT DRAGONBORN: I learned they weren't Dragonborn at pretty much the last possible minute (while listing out all the Dragonborn near the end of Act 2) and made the decision to just leave the mistakes in out of laziness, but also the realization that the mistake says more about the characters than anything I could have written. If they had been utilized better, I doubt an error like that would have survived in my script long.
Is there going to be some sort of way to navigate this magnificent behemoth, like timestamps?
@@anonnymousperson timestamps are in the description
its the least I could do.
You're making my weekend my man, these videos of yours are my absolute favorite online content in years.
Thank you so much for all your countless hours of work. We all greatly appreciate the lengths you take to entertain us.
I love how the Riften Thieves' Guild discuss all their plans directly under the open well in the middle of the town market and they wonder why they have bad luck. Then they hire a mute and things suddenly turn around.
🤣
Thats... enlightening 😄
I never thought of it like that 😂
lol, great way of putting it.
_cut to clever girl scene_
I can't tell if 'mute' is a joke or not tbh
it's crazy how urag is like one of the most memorable characters from skyrim simply because "the arcaneum might as well be my own little plane of oblivion" is just such a character establishing line
It's a line I stole while working as school librarian in high school XD
It's amazing how effective just a sliver of good writing can be
Dont remember him
The fact is I haven't played skyrim in months, and I know urag instantly lol
@@pquonbbx the line isnt even that insanely good but the fact that most of skyrim's dialogue is extremely boring makes the times where it's kind of good stick out so much more
This kind of short-form content is ruining this generation’s attention span
Ok boomer
@@DeepCFisher shuddup nerd ☝️🤓
ikr
The Silver Hand is a group of people who lost family an loved ones to Werewolves. So, they joined together for revenge. See Bethesda, wasn’t hard to make a simple back story
And they would go on to do it again with the _Gunners_
Just slightly better eqquiped raiders in the same way the Silverhand are just slightly different Bandits.
They could have also been lead by people who were originally Companions until they found out about the whole werewolf thing. Hell maybe they were railroaded into joining the circle or leaving like the player is lol. Just like that there is an extra layer to a non-faction.
I'd have joined them, given the option. The Companions are a bunch of preening, arrogant, self-serving, entitled assholes who talk a good game about honour, and glory, but are really just a bunch of lazy thugs and literal bloodthirsty monsters. I've never so intensely disliked a faction in an Elder Scrolls game...except maybe the Stormcloaks. Not even the Thieves Guild or Dark Brotherhood, who are like, supposed to be immoral. But the Companions are presented as 'good'.
@@MediumRareOpinionsGoes even further back than that. Remember Talon company from Fallout 3? A group that is insanely organized and has more locations under their grip than any single faction in the game and you’re never given any backstory to them beyond “Yeah they’re mercenaries that will take literally any contract”. Who formed it? Where are they based out of? How do they recruit new people? Where do they get the resources to provide all of their men with decent armor and weapons that are comparable to the BoS? These mfrs even had artillery set up in multiple areas, something the BoS never managed
@@VoIacious good points
I love how most elder scrolls fans are really passionate about the series while only really liking 1 game outta all of them
Welcome to being a fan of literally any series
Best part of this is I don’t even know which game you’re talking about. My best guess is Morrowind but honestly Oblivion AND Skyrim are both also valid lmfao
@@songbird6414 Don't forget Daggerfall and Arena, though of the two Daggerfall is definitely better.
and that game is ESO
it all depends on which is your first. oldheads love 2 and 3 while newf..s love 4 and 5. idk anyone who actually played 1 when it came out so uhh that i just wont count. its not like soulsborne where it just becomes preference to which iteration of the same formula you like the most. its like asking a new yorker which style of pizza is their favorite, of course theyre gonna pick new york style.
*Ahhh yes this finally gets recommended 5 hours into a premiere...*
*there he is*
The timezones confused TH-cam.
The TH-cam algorithm, it just works.
Thats what you get for breaking everything you touch
Ahh yes, perfectly balanced review that can't be broken even by the power of being perfectly balanced Brit
It's funny, no matter the video if it's praising Skyrim or detailing it's weaknesses it still makes me want to go play it again for the 100th time. It just a comfy old blanket that holds so much nostalgia for me I can't help but still love it.
Same here! I agree with a lot of PatricianTV's points and the game has a lot of flaws, but watching this video... I can't help but want to go play Skyrim anyways.
Honestly the only reason I decided to finally watch this was because I was gonna play skyrim but all the mod packs are down. I agree with all these criticisms 100% aware I'll be crawling back to this mess of a game some day 😂
Guilty as charged, I’m playing it as we speak. I’m working through all the side quests after blasting through the main, for the millionth time. I’m already planning my next play through.
It does the opposite to me, makes my resolve stronger on hating this piece of crap videogame. Because Skyrim represents everything wrong with RPGs.
@@henrycrabs3497 They probably can have fun. Just not absent-minded fun for a specific game.
I am intensely uninterested and even mildly disgusted by CoD. It currently and historically represents just about everything bad about gaming imo. But I get some of the biggest smiles of my life from games like The Cosmic Wheel of Sisterhood.
Advising people to comment a timestamp to save their spot is genius for engagement.
Lmao you’re probably right
HE PLAYED US LIKE A DAMN FIDDLE!
Only works for ultra-long form vids like this though
NAH CHIEF, MAMA RAISE NO QUITTER! I RAW DOG THE WHOLE VIDEO
@baronvonbeandip Guys, I found Robin Atkin Downes 👆
I liked the part where he complained about magic for 2 hours, very relatable
Seriously. Every time I try to do a mage play through I get bored like halfway through and switch to something else.
@@gabelachenman408 Stealth archer 60% of the time every time.
@@gabelachenman408 i recommend a pure mage playthrough with the Vokrii + Odin mod combo. First time i actually felt like a proper mage in Skyrim
@@MrClubfoot90 i start out a conjurer and somehow end up a stealth archer with a bound bow..every time
As a mage player in every fantasy game, I second all that rant.
It always bothered me that my character's soul was promised to like 8 different afterlives by the end of the game.
It’s going to be a battle royal to see who gets the Dragonborn’s soul
ah yes, the elder scrolls equivalent to john Constantine
John Constantine is immortal for the very same reason. After he dies various deitys will fight over what happens to him
I think we're misunderstanding what becoming a champion of a deity is supposed to be. Obviously the Dragonborn can't go to the afterlife of any of the Daedra, because their soul is, by default, part of Akatosh, and as such, would return to Akatosh no matter what. Way I understand it, one has to actually dedicate themselves to a particular deity, whereas the protags of the games just contact the Daedric Princes for some immediate profit.
@@georgeoldsterd8994 what about the thieves guild quest line? You clearly pledge yourself to nocturnal also sithis if you join the dark brotherhood then there’s Mora at the end of Dragonborn
*Looks at video length - 9 hours*
"Holy shit"
*Looks at title - Act 1*
"HOLY SHIT"
I know right
The part about the dark brotherhood and Nazir's "less important" contracts didn't even need to be so self-damaging with it's presentation and insistence on being less important. Just establish that Nazir is efficient and Astrid is creative, so the contracts that have weird requirements (Baenlin and the mounted head, Francois Motierre, to draw from oblivion examples) go through Astrid as she pieces together how to satisfy the client's unique requests, while the simple "Just kill him I don't care how it gets done" go through Nazir.
His line should be something more like "I'll admit, my contracts aren't as glamorous or as exciting as Astrid's. I handle the simpler jobs that come through. There's plenty of work to be had here, but don't expect a grand elaborate heist." His established attitude even works with the idea that he handles simple and efficient contracts, while his teasing jabs and jokes can be how he copes with how boring the jobs tend to be.
Farkas murders the main character in cold blood and walks away slowly while saying: “You look strong. Come to Jorrvaskr and be a companion”
Ah yes, the peak Skyrim experience.
To be fair, if you can get back up to get to jorrvaskr and join the companions after being bludgeoned to death, you're probably reasonably cut out for a warrior faction
@@voratheexplorer6442 They should hire more necromancers
No sign of em
I think my peak skyrim moment was when I killed a bunch of thugs, pull the note to see who I pissed off, and see the name "Drayden" or some shit.
I have no idea who that is, so I google it. Whatever the name is nothing comes up. So I'm sitting there confused as to who the fuck I need to murder to prove a point, until I go to level up.
I was "Drayden" it was me. I hired the hitmen to kill myself. I literally have no idea what I did to trigger this, I'm assuming it was a Mod issue, but that's the most Skyrim thing I've had happen.
@@getthegoons So your Tyler Durden did it, just so someone could come kick the shit out of him?
The hired thugs trying to kill you can lead to some unintentional silliness. My first encounter with them was leaving Solitude. I was very surprised and it was a tough fight because I was on the highest difficulty (before a patch added a newer highest difficulty).
I then read the contract and learned it was the innkeeper I had stayed with. I stole some small consumable (I think a potion?) from my room. I had basically done the equivalent of not paying for those overpriced snacks that some hotels offer, and the innkeep responded with attempted murder.
You stole the really special hotel soap.
I thought Pat said that they don't sell thuggs for stealing, only for killing the people they know??
I vaguely remember doing something similar, I think I misclicked on something and accidentally stole a flower or whatever from a shelf, I dropped it hoping to not get a bounty and the thugs showed up as soon as I left the building. Word gets around fast for a place with no internet.
I've had thugs hired to come after me multiple times by children, which is just silly.
No it's actually worse because the letter no matter who hires the thugs States that they don't have to kill you but they don't care either way
It feels good to know that my anger and rage about the magic "system" isn't just me. Calling it now that TES6 will have 3 spells per school, and 3 schools total. I see restoration getting phased out and made available to all.
Mysticism rest in Peace
Ever since the first time I listened to this video I come back to hear your magic rant again, it feels liberating to hear someone else understand my pain about magic in skyrim.
I've listened to his magic rant 4 times, fills my smooth brain with feel good juice listening to it.
Time stamp?
@@wandersagrobasically the whole college of winterhold section lol
same but for the companions and civil war.
3:47:00
Shamus Young had a great point about The Companions. Imagine you are walking down a sidewalk, maybe heading to the bank or something, and there is a road crew doing work on the road. You pass just as they finish and one of the workers runs up to you and says, "some help you were." It's the exact same thing with Aela and the giant fight at the beginning of the game. It's so ridiculous. Bethesda was so terrified of the player missing the Companions in tiny Whiterun that they shoved the faction into the player's face in the dumbest way possible. Then they did it again with the Thieves Guild.
My favorite thing about that is how I got lost the first time I played and ended up in a dungeon before I made it to whiterun. I completely missed the encounter with the companions and the giant. As much as they tried to make it unavoidable, I missed it without even knowing it was a thing until my next character.
Yet this never happens for the College of Winterhold. Sure, every court mage will tell you to check it out, but it is in no way forced on the character like the other 2 main factions. Thanks Todd
I agree but it’s waaaaayyyyy dumber in the case of the thieves guild. Like… dude… it’s the THIEVES guild. Doesn’t it seem like the worst conceivable idea to literally walk up to random strangers and invite them to join your clandestine, secret, underground criminal organization? Like imagine walking into a pizza parlor in New York and some dude is like “ayy you look like you would be really good at intimidations rackets”
Right imagine going into the sewers finding a bar with the bartender that asked you to get an item that was "stolen" and after that gets introduced to a friend that needs help without much detail thrown in just to meet him at a place at a time and you have to get back an item that was stolen from him after which you are told to go to a 3rd place where you are then formerly introduced to the thieves guild with the first two being tests about willingness to break into buildings and second that you can follow orders and instructions and show skill.
Rather being walked up on in the town market announcing that I'm here to steal
Happy to see that Shamus Young is still getting some love. He was such a great writer.
Killing Astrid was the first thing I tried, and seeing the quest failed text only to be immediately followed by "Destroy the Dark Brotherhood" was the most satisfying thing in the game.
.Too bad that quest really sucked...
The best thing about it is that, if you don't decapitate her with your killcam, she actually whispers "well done" as she dies.
I'd say it's a shame there wasn't more of that kind of stuff, but that quest was rather lackluster, I don't know if they'd have made anything else you could "fail" and start a differing questline for would be any better.
@@Alpine1996 i wish they actually made a quest to destroy thiefs guild.
@@Alpine1996 Yup. Totally agree! I hate how they basically force you to be bad guy, or at the very least "The Antihero". And worst part is that it doesnt even matter what you choose in the game, its the cannon lore that states that you end up being connected to daedra. In oblivion you end up taking over Sheogorath's realm, and Dragonborn just becomes Hermeus Mora's new collectable. I hate that!
I got one for you. Doing the Thieves Guild as a Vampire. Which are RESISTANT TO POISON. So paralysis poison SHOULD HAVE HAD NO EFFECT. X_X
But it's a *special* poison.
*waves hand vaguely*
"It's symbolic. I wouldn't expect you to understand."
@@drago3036"Couched in mythic allegory and symbolism."
What I've learned from this video is that typical RPG progression mechanics are fundamentally incompatible with "flexible playstyle" mentality. You can't have enemies get harder over time and give players more damage on their main abilities and then expect them to be successful starting over with something new
You should probably unlearn that because its untrue. Just because Bethesda sucks at conveying the idea doesn't make it a bad one.
As an example, if the RPG skills were agglutinative as opposed to exclusionary, avatar strength would scale linearly with player level. If the pool that strength drew from was shared to all skills, strengthening that pool would simply scale everything uniformly (more or less).
@@baronvonbeandipif levelling up your strength also increased your arrow and magic damage than it's already not a *traditional RPG mechanic*, bc the entire point of role playing is making choices about your character progression, and homogenizing it like this would make the choices irrelevant. That's also why flexible playstyles are incompatible with a traditional RPG experience, bc a traditional role play involves you picking a role and playing as it. How often do you see in fiction mages deciding to trade their staff for a bow or warriors deciding to battle with pure magic for a couple fights; not often right, because people don't abandon the skills they've learned for years. The best way you can achieve flexibility is just allowing people to refund their levelling/perks in RPGs that use the traditional system like Fallout, so that you can just take back all the upgrade points and perks you put into and place them into new categories. Though I don't see how this could work with Elder Scrolls levelling system where the skills level up by usage
I think the way STALKER did level scaling was good. Basically an open world FPS, mostly killing humies but also mutant monsters. In the begining areas you're mostly fighting dudes in tracksuits, cuz russian game, and cheap, simple guns. then later one you're fighting experienced fighters with advanced body armour and weapons, and the monsters get more dangerous and numerous too, as well as environmental hazards.
So the baseline humans basically don't change, just their gear and tactics, which you can get as well, and the monsters and environment hazards kind of scale up too as you get more experienced with dealing with them, and as an add on there's a story reason for all this too. Felt very natural, and you can always go back and curb stomp the early areas. Heck u can even "downgrade" yourself by changing back your gear to the lower level stuff and see how well you fare with only your new experience on how the game works. Not much reason to actually do this but I loved the games so I just did for fun, which I think is a good sign of a good game
Picture this: The year is 2060. TES6 finally came out in 2043, and now the time has come to look back at it. You and your adult children get together - the whole extended family does, in fact. PatricianTV’s 70 hour analysis is about to release, and the government has decreed that the winter holidays will be extended an extra two weeks (mandatory). You tell the grandkids stories of how you were there at the Oblivion and Skyrim analysis premieres. Maybe you watched the Morrowind videos the moment they first released.
It’s gonna be a good 70 hours, you think to yourself.
Picture this: The year is 2060. Will still hasn't come back to TH-cam after what he considered a harsh review of his content by Patrician.
@@admiraltonydawning3847 Picture this: Todd Howard in his old age has decided, after the contentious relationship with Morrowind fans and their 6 (soon to be 7) fan-ports into other engines (including TES6 and DaggerfallUnity3), to hire PatricianTV as his loremaster and lead supervisor to balance out retaining the old guard-- now several generations deep of Morrowind fans-- with pulling in new audiences with modernized action RPG mechanics and plots.
You learn this fact from a cameo by old man Todd in the last 30 seconds of this 70 hours epic.
Vaporwave
only 70 hours?
I was here! I WAS HERE!!!
Got to the bit about the werewolfs-THANK YOU! It was always so irritating to have a nord warrior character having to abandon the nord warrior afterlife to play the nord warrior questline
yeah it's kind of weird how shallow the warrior questline is for the game that is rather warrior oriented. I mean heck the primary antagonists are just reskinned bandits but with silver swords and alchemy ingredients. there *might* have been cut content that would have made the silver hand more interesting. But nothing came of it.
@@privatepessleneck heckin heckerino, here ave a updoot friendo, omg i love doggos and reddit sooo much lol im so rndom lolooll
@@sigrdrifa0 Heck is more than a Reddit word, no need to have PTSD over a euphemism for hell.
@@sigrdrifa0 Are you having a stroke?
@Victoria Thorson
Based. Too many redditoids polluting everything with their repugnant jargon. They're already coping and seething after being found out.
These two videos should be mandatory viewing for at least some TES 6 staff
The whole series should be mandatory viewing for *the whole* staff. They should watch it as a group and argue over the points he makes for a week or two straight.
@@baronvonbeandip I think it’s mostly important the senior designers and leads watch the videos. I’d say emil in particular needs to watch these but we all know how he deals with criticism, so i’m not holding my breath that any of this will get through to the person who needs to hear it most lmao.
Really it just makes me sad that a series with as much untapped potential as the goddamn elder scrolls has to languish as a result of devs who decided long ago that dumbing down the game’s systems to the point where character role play wasn’t even really viable anymore was the best way to sell more copies. The worst thing is that it did, and went on to bolster their highly flawed ideas about about what players wanted from their games. They kept taking meaningful stuff out under the pretense of keeping things simple. Now we have starfield, a game with so few meaningful mechanics to engage with that it’s not really anything special to anyone. It just exists in this lame state of being kind of alright at everything.
Idk, hopefully some senior Bethesda devs played baldur’s gate or something and had a come to Jesus moment about how shallow their modern “RPG” games are by comparison. The future of elder scrolls is looking grim quite honestly.
@@Gamernutritionfacts Honestly none of that matters if they insist on using a game engine that's one of, if not the worst, in the industry. I have never played games that feel worse to play than Bethesda games.
Your character feels like a floating camera with zero feedback. The gunplay in starfield is just.. wow. They should teach college game development classes about how not to make a video game feel good to play and use Bethesda games as an example.
@@beeman4266At least the older titles were RPGs where you could kinda get away with it. The closer it comes to action adventure, the more obvious the engine flaws are.
The whole series (Morrowind, Oblivion, both Skyrim and Starfield videos) should be mandatory viewing for Todd and Emil especially. A lot of the problems with the later games come down to their direction and writing respectively.
1:31:52 the difference between kicking in dark messiah, and shield bashing in Skyrim is that dark messiah does the most damage with environmental hazards. They're not just kicking to stunlock, they're kicking them into spikes, drops, traps, or other enemies. In Skyrim, the environment is rarely a factor at all, other than line of sight.
I disagree, my brothers and I were using the unrelenting force shout to throw people off cliffs or down a slope to do a lot of damage to them. Obviously this is mostly outdoors fighting, and with enemies that can get ragdolled. I think that the environment is a factor in skyrim.
@@davidreeding9176 except when they just happen to bounce down the terrain mesh in such a way that they never actually fall enough to trigger the fall damage, because the velocity based damage never works properly. It was fun for about five minutes the first time I tried though.
@@davidreeding9176 How can the environment can be a factor in Skyrim's combat if it can be utilized with only a single dragon shout and a select number of preset dungeon traps? You're unlikely to be fighting next to cliffs for roughly at least 80% of the game as well, so whatever factor all of this brings is so insignificant that it might as well just not exist.
@@superplayerex2431 shouting an archer off of a tower, for example, or shoving a person down a cliff. These are things you can do. I should've said that the environment CAN be a factor instead of saying it is a factor. However, my point still stands. If there is an enemy next to a cliff, you can shout them off of it, and maybe the game decides if that does damage to them or not.
@@davidreeding9176 Yeah, but just because these are things you can do does not mean they even remotely suffice as a factor in combat significant enough to make it a good point towards the game.
Just look at Dark Messiah's kick and how it is a nearly essential tool in your arsenal with various practical uses in combat that has significant impact not only because of those uses, but also because the environment is actively shaped to give it use. This is not the same for Skyrim whatsoever. Vast majority of your combat encounters will be on flat ground with pretty much zero environmental hazards to use against your enemies.
So, once again, whatever depth environmental hazards have in Skyrim is incredibly shallow to the point that they might as well have not existed in the first place. I've done whole playthroughs of the game where I never shouted or used any hazards to my advantage because there's just no incentive for it and the combat itself is so simple, there's no reason to bother. Like another commenter mentioned before, the whole "shouting crowds of enemies off a cliff" thing is only funny for about five minutes before you entirely forget it even exists in the game.
I love these very quick video's. Im surprised more short style videos like this aren't more popular
I think it’s because most just don’t know how to explain things so expediently
The Way We Look at Things
You should know this, Timothy, that in the last days there will be very difficult times.
-2 Timothy 3:1
Someone said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
A Christian worldview will affect the way that we see everything. And why is this important? Because we are living in the last days. Jesus Christ is coming back again. And if ever there was a time when we need to know our Bibles and have a close walk with Christ, the time is now.
Describing the end times, the apostle Paul said, “In the last days there will be very difficult times. For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred. They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control”
(2 Timothy 3:1-3)
Paul went on to say, “They will be cruel and hate what is good. They will betray their friends, be reckless, be puffed up with pride, and love pleasure rather than God. They will act religious, but they will reject the power that could make them godly”
(verses 3-5)
Is that not an accurate assessment of the times in which we are living? The United States has never been more spiritual yet more immoral. We throw the word spiritual around a lot. But do we know what it means?
We live in an age when we can write our own apps and customize our home screens. We can keep the stuff we like and throw out the things we don’t. And we carry that thinking into other aspects of our lives. The result is something called moral relativism.
Moral relativism is the belief that there are no absolutes. There is no right or wrong. Moral relativism teaches that we are all products of the evolutionary process and not made by a Creator God. There is no devil. There is no good or evil. And there is no plan or purpose for our lives.
Moral relativism also teaches that we are all basically good, and if we happen to go bad, then it’s because we’re simply products of our environment. It teaches that we make our own truth.
For instance, if you believe in a God of love, forgiveness, and mercy, you can keep that. But if you’re offended by the biblical teaching of a God of holiness, righteousness, and judgment, you can delete that. It works out perfectly. Or so it seems.
Moral relativism may sound fine in theory. But what if we were to put it into practice? Will a god of our own making be able to save us in the final day? Of course not.
A biblical worldview says there is a God as revealed in the Bible, and the Bible alone is the authority and source of that belief. It is not what we feel or what is popular, acceptable, or perceived as cool. It is what the Bible says.
Average attention span is 30 seconds, if we’re lucky. Good thing this is the shortest vid yet.
Idk what you’re talking about?!? It’s literally 9 hours!!!
@@Justausername10 r/woosh
Seeing Meridia's Beacon in that Egg Sac had me crying of laughter for a solid 2 minutes
Seeing "Meridia's Beacon" in the loot window made me physically cringe in anticipation of the dialogue
Can’t believe I caught that as well in this 9 hour video. Is that where you’d normally find that?
@@austinbevis4266 it’s a random drop, I’ve found it in every odd nook and cranny from random chests in the wild to inside dungeon chests. It’s like a clingy ex who won’t get over the fact you dumped them.
*a nEw hAnD tOuChEs tHe bEaCon!*
@@pablocruz5613 oh lol, I always remember finding it on a pedestal. Maybe that’s where you end up placing it
The Hired Thug event is funny because I stole nothing and eventually it fired anyway. And it was the Hagraven you end up drunkenly marrying. Me and my sister searched for ages to find this character only to get a hilarious reveal once we were on that drunk daedra quest
aye thats Moira she sends thugs after you if you steal from or kill anise in anise's cabin. the cabin just across the river from the guardian stones. Anise is Moira's sister.
I feel my bones trying to escape my skin every time I hear Emil Pagliarulo say “great American novel”
which is often because I constantly watch this video
Omg same. I started double tapping the video to skip it whenever he talks during that part
I felt your rage on the magic system man, Bethesda is like a pizza place that sells the best pizza dough of all time, but they are to lazy to make the other ingredients good since the dough sells so well, so the rest of the ingredients are literally human feces, so you go buy dough and make the rest of the pizza by yourself in your house with mods.
They need someone like Obsidian to handle the story and dialog for them for the elder scrolls games like Obsidian did for Fallout New Vegas. Just focus on the world design
@@belhariry why pay someone when you have an entire mod community to monkeys-with-typewriters a better game?
@@belhariry Obsidian is a terrible company now, and they will not help in any way shape or form.
I would rather play Fallout 4, again, then have to sit through the slog fest that is Outerworlds. "We get it, you're a communist"
@@johnny1599 Sadly true, the Obsidian that made New Vegas simply does not exist anymore.
I can't agree more.
1:13:20 It reminds me of a Tumblr post that someone made a while ago, where they pointed out that Bethesda's "environmental storytelling" is usually just placing a dead body somewhere and placing a note on it that's like, "Oh, no, I've been murdered!"
LMAOOOOOOOO
"i sure hope i don't become a skeleton :("
Reminds me of the one cave that drained the life energy of anyone who was in it, and some guy kept a journal with entries spanning several days right up to the point of death about he was starving, thirsty and so weak he couldn't lift his arm... yet he was writing that in perfect handwriting at the same time, instead of just crawling his dumbass out of the cave to fucking survive and escape it's draining touch.
A better example would be the Wooden Mask you can find at the Dragon Priest summit, its subtlely implied that the Thalmor were after the Khonarik Golden Dragon Priest Mask and made a time-travelling mask to find it, but his bodyguards killed him in suspicion.
@@lightningkitten that made me laugh harder than it should have
It's my sleepover, I get to pick the movie.
Stealing comments because you can't have an original thought.
@@frauleinhohenzollern how dare i
05:21:48
God, this section about the nonexistence of Bethesda-like open world RPGs with actually good magic systems from other devs just absolutely broke my heart. Been feeling that pain since 2008. We need other devs to pick up the torch Bethsoft threw in the trash, just like with PDX interactive.
Dragon's Dogma came out 7 months after Skyrim and being a Sorcerer in that us awesome. Meteors, tornado, lightning whip, ice tendrils, ect. Can't wait for DD2.
@@joevile240 Did you see that there was new info about DD2? The new vocation looks fun.
@@halcionjoy7 Trickster looked neat. But I'm probably going back to Magick Archer.
@@joevile240 I wasn't talking about the Trickster. They revealed a new one called the Warfarer. Can use every weapon, but has poor stat growths.
@@halcionjoy7 Oooo, need to check that out.
I found Riften so funny during my playthrough. I'll be honest, my initial reaction was pretty positive. I thought that having a crooked guard try to swindle you as you enter was a nice touch and a good first impression for the "Thieves Guild City."
Then all that goodwill was instantly lost when I actually entered and five separate NPC's approached me to announce how much they *love* crime
It's a great example of media undermining itself by lacking all restraint. They couldn't just drop a big hint that this town had crime and corruption, they had to go so over the top with it that it swings back into absurdity
This is why I kill the thieves guild every playthrough.
Genuinely so much of Riften's intrigue could have been saved by just having the talk about the thieves guild be prompted by the player talking to someone saying "hey i almost got mugged by the guards" and then the thieves guild gets introduced. After the player starts asking around Brynolf comes up to them and starts asking them if they're interested in actually joining the guild or if they're going to have a problem
I would have settled for literally any player choice whatsoever
The Way We Look at Things.
You should know this, Timothy, that in the last days there will be very difficult times.
-2 Timothy 3:1
Someone said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
A Christian worldview will affect the way that we see everything. And why is this important? Because we are living in the last days. Jesus Christ is coming back again. And if ever there was a time when we need to know our Bibles and have a close walk with Christ, the time is now.
Describing the end times, the apostle Paul said, “In the last days there will be very difficult times. For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred. They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control”
(2 Timothy 3:1-3)
Paul went on to say, “They will be cruel and hate what is good. They will betray their friends, be reckless, be puffed up with pride, and love pleasure rather than God. They will act religious, but they will reject the power that could make them godly”
(verses 3-5)
Is that not an accurate assessment of the times in which we are living? The United States has never been more spiritual yet more immoral. We throw the word spiritual around a lot. But do we know what it means?
We live in an age when we can write our own apps and customize our home screens. We can keep the stuff we like and throw out the things we don’t. And we carry that thinking into other aspects of our lives. The result is something called moral relativism.
Moral relativism is the belief that there are no absolutes. There is no right or wrong. Moral relativism teaches that we are all products of the evolutionary process and not made by a Creator God. There is no devil. There is no good or evil. And there is no plan or purpose for our lives.
Moral relativism also teaches that we are all basically good, and if we happen to go bad, then it’s because we’re simply products of our environment. It teaches that we make our own truth.
For instance, if you believe in a God of love, forgiveness, and mercy, you can keep that. But if you’re offended by the biblical teaching of a God of holiness, righteousness, and judgment, you can delete that. It works out perfectly. Or so it seems.
Moral relativism may sound fine in theory. But what if we were to put it into practice? Will a god of our own making be able to save us in the final day? Of course not.
A biblical worldview says there is a God as revealed in the Bible, and the Bible alone is the authority and source of that belief. It is not what we feel or what is popular, acceptable, or perceived as cool. It is what the Bible says.
Oh boy I sure do love crime.
Wait why are you taking out your weapon and quick saving?
Love the fact that the Auger of Dunlane is just a huge scaled up Magelight
magelighthouse
I hate the fact that you can't skip his useless dialogue. He really just says a bunch of nothingness.
@@azuragoddess"But duuuude the lore!1!"
I like to think that casting magelight is casting a mini auger
@@nagger8216"Mmmm yes, a bounty of soul energy from the greaaaat collaaaapppse."
Coming back to listen this fantastic video while working my construction My only critique is that cookbooks aren’t really modern, we have cookbooks from the early medieval period, and many Roman cookbooks as well.
The concept of a recipe is as ancient as human civilization and the advent of fire, so it's a wild point to call a cookbook a modern invention. Tameriel has had written history for hundreds of years a cookbook is not outlandish it's odd there's not more cookbooks, like a compendium of all those alchemy recipe notes.
It would be a cool quest to collect recipes for an alchemist trying to pen one even.
imagine mages being glass cannons when they can be glass peashooters
Honestly, after all these years, I'm waiting for TES VI only because i hope patritian will make that 40-hour sprint review
same
i don't care about the game and won't even pirate it
but i'm waiting to see if it comes out at all so patrician tv can make a 30 hour any % speedrun analysis
It will be his magnum opus
That review will come out 6 years after the game launches tho
me want Oblivion remaster
@@AChunkyDog skyblivion is releasing next year
The funniest thing I remember from my most recent playthrough is never going to whiterun and never letting dragons exist. Truly liberating
The fact that it works like that bothers the hell out of me. Luckily the alternate start mod Skyrim Unbound has an option so dragons spawn x in-game days after the beginning of the game regardless of what you do. Even cooler, you start the main quest by killing one of them on your own and dynamically finding out you're the dragonborn when you absorb its soul. It's such a cool change.
@@steel5897 lol I just love not having to deal with dragons tbh
@@fartgarfunkeljr Oblivion gates suck but at least you can run past them and the enemies that spawn. Dragons on the other hand...
@@helter1234 Better have good sneak or your fucked lol.
@@rayw.6677 I always used the ring glitch to put my speed at about 150 so I outran everything. No need to sneak
its abt time for the rewatch
Oh cool, A Skyrim retrospective that doesnt spend half of its run time sucking off Morrowind and Oblivion.
Despite what a bunch of commentors think
I never realized the potential of Skyrim VR until I saw the footage of you waking up Mirabelle Ervine, groveling at the statue of Meridia, and slapping the orc who was talking in the middle of Malacath's speech. I've watched your Morrowind and Oblivion retrospectives multiple times start to finish, thanks for another 20 hours of entertainment.
It was shoving the Dawnstar guard for me
Tbh with certain mods like Spellsiphon, magic feels so good in SkyrimVR and the melee combat works well enough that you can still be a little campy.
Absolutely my favorite way to play Skyrim
Oh my gosh, when he pushed on her face repeatedly, then her bed becomes occupied while chatting.... simply priceless!
Witnessed the orc slapping today as finished Part II. That slap was carried out with pure authority.
i need timestamp
At this point you and Private Sessions are just competing to see who can monopolize more of my free time and I'm loving it.
Thanks for the recommendation, I love long form stuff.
Point and click adventure breakdowns by oneshorteye have been my binge recently
@@Guitar-Dog patrician wasn’t kidding when he said that despite collaborating closely with Private sessions and holding a similar philosophy/style, they take very different approaches to their videos on the game. I can confidently second the recommendation
@@Guitar-Dog Oh do you now? May I introduce...Mauler and EFAP
@@ChiefCrewin are they still beating the SW and Marvel horse? I can only hear disney bad so many times
@@ChiefCrewin mauler just gives pedantic long ass plot recaps lol
Even after watching this video, i still decided to play Skyrim recently. I took a 2 year break from the game. Even with all its flaws, there's just something about the game that pulls me back in.
Like what? I’ve never played (and sadly I don’t intend to. It’s just not my cup of tea). What brings you back to play it
Yeah, we wanna know.
Well, it was my first Bethesda game. I had never played a game with so much freedom. But i have to admit that I stopped playing again because after i finished Fallout New Vegas, I realize how shallow the game actually is.
@@lucianwong420This is truly a heartwarming tale. Freedom is only as free as the size of the box you find yourself in, huh?
@@baronvonbeandip Haha, you're not wrong.
I find it weird that Emil had that speech where he talks about people "Ripping the pages out of your great novel and making paper airplanes with them" When it was the acknowledgement from the audience on his Dark Brotherhood storyline in Oblivion that made him so important in Bethesda
Also, he knows what an airplane is 😮
One thing about Skyrim I will unquestionably praise is the OST. Its absolutely fantastic across the board.
True, but don’t forget how amazing Oblivions sound track was. Jermey Soule is a genius.
I still listen to it all the time
And to think Jeremy Soule started by recording things like the leaky office sink as sound effects for Secret of Evermore. :)
The world map is very pretty too
@@Rannos22 Yeah it is. Actually I really like Skyrim's graphics even now. It has a very consistent art style, and everything is modeled quite well. It is a huge step up from Morrowind, and especially Oblivion. Might not be bleeding edge anymore, but Its a far cry of being butt ugly, like many games of its generation.
My first contact with the companions:
1.Get yelled at for not helping
2.Enter Building with 2 people fighting
3.Use my heal spell which seemed to bug them out, they draw their weapon and go on a rampage
4.About 5 people are now dead
It just works.
worst questline imo. Just kinda bland and doesn't introduce anything. CoW atleast had a good couple mechanics that were special.
Sounds about right, same if you try to stop rogvirs execution
@@Straline. Not true, you get the werewolf ability which you will use as rarely as possible
Certified Companion moment.
The very first time I tried the thieves guild questline, at Golden Glow while in the apiary, a dragon attacked, landed on the fence and blasted all the beehives in a single breath. A fucking dragon attacks and destroys this business' vital assets within spitting distance of Riften and Mercer has no clue and acts like its all my fault?
That would take at least speech 80 to convincingly explain
"You didn't give your life to protect the beehives from a dragon? You don't love me anymore."
- Brynjolf
On the one hand, as dragonborn, the PC would be one of the people who could believably use that excuse.
On the other, I'm just imagining the dovahkin constantly going "a dragon ate my homework" and I am inordinately amused by the thought.
Listening to this a second (or third) time
I'm actually writing down notes about game and magic system design.
I want to make my own game at some point, and these videos are invaluable research and feedback
Same.
@baronvonbeandip YO, put aliens in your game! Aliens are *DOPE!* or like, GIANT scorpions! 😮 lol idk.
Good luck on the game, though, really
The state of the Winterhold College really bugs me. I wanted so bad to roleplay a magic student and not two lessons in I was archmage.
Play Oblivion.
Thanks to some finicky looseness on the definition of what "casting a spell" means, you can become Archmage without having ever cast a spell yourself.
The least educated Dragonborn can just pick up a couple staves or scrolls and be hailed as the new Archmage.
Despite how fun to play Skyrim is this game never deserved 10/10
@@TheFloodFourm is Oblivion that much better?
@@731freeman I wouldn't call the Oblivion Mage's Guild questline "good" exactly, but it at the very least actually tries to replicate what being a student of magic would be like. In fact that's what most of the questlines in Oblivion are: lacking in objective quality, but you can at least tell there was real effort put in and there ARE good ideas there. Unlike Skyrim's quests.
Best part about the Companions quest line is that you can tell off Aela when you first meet her after the giant fight and she'll still invite you to join them anyways.
She's the original Preston Garvey, no matter what you say she still adds the quest to your journal.
I stole the gate key for whiterun off her so i could get in after telling the guard to go to hell.
Companions: "Its so fucked up how Kodlak can't go to Sovengarde because of his beast blood"
Also Companions: "Become a werewolf or leave"
I am fond of the theory that the Dragonborn can dump dragon souls. on all of the entities he pledges his soul to.
"Yeah i know i swore my undying soul to nocturnal. But this dragon soul is mine and thats the onr you get"
Nevermind the fact that the dragonborn has a fragment of akatosh or lorkhan as a soul and that isnt really his to bargain with
@@gewuerzwanze5627plus for a lot of Daedra you never directly promise your soul to them. It's just "Mortal, I need ya to do me a favor. In exchange I'll give you an artifact of mine". No worship attached.
@@azathoththe3rd yeah thats why i mentioned nocturnal specifically
The problem with this game is you hardly ever go to the sky. Not even the rim of it. So the game already lies to you on that alone. At least Morrowind had a lot of wind storms and other wind related things.
Not only was the wind today, but it was also on the morrow. Also with fatigue if you ran and jumped very far and were attacked you would go 'Far, then fell'.
It's funny because part of the game has you go through the valley of the wind at dawn or dusk to find the moon-and-star.
The frightening thought is there will be at least one person who reads the comment above & nods along without irony, rather than dismissing it as the equivalent of someone scratching "For a good time, call" on a bathroom stall.
Also nerevarine always sets things off to tomorrow to make time for his power nap
@@richardlionerheart1945 Nerevarine "We start later every tims you interupt my sleep."
I recall a post about Todd Howard being in chess club, model UN, debate club, and Tennis or something. With a caption along the lines of: "No wonder he thinks it's acceptable to be master of all guilds and factions". Just something rewatching this series has made me remember
1:52:38 This video was the first time I saw that post
Tyler Mcvicker exposed those as lies though. Looking at the yearbooks of the school he went to he was never in the chess club
@@wile123456He was in the chess club in middle school
Howard to me comes off as someone who has blundered into success. Someone who has won the lottery.
He never lies
spears should be in every single game that has armed cqc, no excuses... i will die on that hill...
They are like, the quintessential medieval armament. Besides bows, or maybe a halberd.
You probably won't die on that hill because you were armed with a spear.
11:17
I just wanna highlight that during the cart sequence, you still haven't made your character, so it would be either very immersion breaking to have the player see them as another character, only to have to morph into whatever character you wish minutes later.
It's because Ralof is actually talking to the player. That's why you can't respond except with gestures. That's why Doki Doki Literature wholesale copied Skyrim's formula with the character Monika.
The craziest thing about the Companions isn’t just that they force you to become a werewolf. But when you first turn, the game *expects* you to go kill random Whiterun civilians to test out your powers. Like, these guys are supposed to be mercenaries that defend the city. And they just let you loose to go kill innocent people? Why not have the player character go on a werewolf rampage in the silver hand base? Or better yet, have the silver hand attack on Jorvaskyr happen much earlier in the questline minus the slaying of Kodlak that way the newbie player character Companion can prove himself further by testing his werewolf skills on people who actually deserve it and thus protecting the home of the Companions while doing so. Skyrim is the only game where the heroic warrior factions make you feel more like a scumbag rather than a hero
I remember way back on release when I first did that quest, I did go on a rampage not thinking much of it. Only during that killing spree, Belethor happened to be leaving his shop and aggroed, and I killed him during the scene, which meant he was dead for good after the transformation ended. Which meant that, until Ysolda decided to take up the mantel, I just didn't have access to the Whiterun general store for a non-insignificant amount of time.
Hell, instead of rampaging in the city, they could have had an underground training area that they used for the new Werewolfs to get the hang of their powers while also not potentially harming innocent people during it.
You don't need to go on The rampage, you just need to wait for like 5min. With you do that they will Say "Many of Us don't have the luck to not go on a bloodbath on your first night as a werewolf"
@@samfire3067 yeah so basically, the game still expects you to go kill random npcs because the Companions will have special dialogue just in case you decide not to 😭
@@samfire3067 I think the point still stands that they know a newly turned werewolf is generally inclined toward a blood rage and left you in the middle of a town to go through it. Even if you can just stand in place, the Companions are impressed that you didn't slaughter the people they put you in a position to slaughter.
Are you guys dumb? Did you not read the 3 lines of dialogue before the blood ritual? The whole point of the night of the transformation is to RP how you would act as a werewolf (either rampage or just leave the city) and you get a dialogue acording to your choice. We know thanks to Aela that some werewolves can control themselves and others just go feral. Just because you're smoothbrained and need to click every red dot on map for a dopamine release doesn't mean the game is badly designed. If this sort of roleplaying option was on morrowind you guys would praise it 😂.
I've never even played any Elder Scrolls games, I'm just using this to try to get through my shifts stocking shelves so I don't go crazy from the monotony. It's a lot easier when you have a huge piece of content like this.
That’s fucking amazing lmao
Yo! Another one like me! I do the same thing lol. Joseph Anderson has also been a godsend
There’s literally one million podcasts in the world
You should play them, they are awesome but buggy
Play Skyrim!!
It's so hard for players to agree on skyrims intentions, themes, history, and thought process, because it was so hard for the developers to do the same
That's because it's just a video game.
This man has worked so hard on this video and just use it as something to fall asleep to. I feel bad
The dedication of actually dropping everything and heading to Windhelm only to be out of lock picks is the peak of comedy
Directed by Larry David
One idea that I've seen to make the companions questline much better deals with the silver hand being a group that split off from the companions after the circle became werewolves. That the silver hand stayed true to Ysgramor and their nordic heritage by rebelling against lycanthropy and trying to find the pieces of wuthraad to honor Ysgramor. This would've added so much depth and maybe you could've even joined the silver hand to return the companions guild to their former glory, rather than being forced to become a werewolf.
I really like this idea. Such a simple concept that might not have taken much time to incorporate into the factions quest line. And as you said it would add so much depth to the companions, along with providing an interesting way to have a meaningful interaction with the silver hand.
@@himynameis3664 I wouldn't say that would be a quick or easy add. You would need to make new quests (even if they are just radiant quests featuring wolfs and maybe a werewolf), a comparable number of voice lines, unless Bethesda wanted to be super lazy they would need the town to have opinions on the Silver Hand killing and replacing the local guild. Add this to Patrician's theory that the werewolf stuff was added late and they were already ignorant enough about denying becoming a werewolf.
Some fans could probably do a barebones version of it. Or a really good version depending on voice acting and the ability to avoid breaking the game by killing the Companions.
@@himynameis3664 It most likely would have taken a LOT of time to implement. Knowing Bethesda’s writing process, they would not only add more depth to the Silver Hand (in this case completely reworking who they are, creating more characters and needing more voice lines) but would also dehumanize and strip depth from the Companions. As cool as it would be for the Dragonborn to have to choose between a no-nonsense guild of werewolf hunters or a community-bound guild of werewolf warriors, The Elder Scrolls isn’t really known for their ability to create dynamic, impactful, and difficult choices. I may be wrong but I believe this idea came from Fudge Muppet and is honestly a very good idea. However the fact that the Silver Hand in game is just a bandit faction with silver weapons proves Bethesda either did not have time or simply didnt care
And you know what? Kodlack DOES NOT like being a ware wolf in the end. He actively wants to un-lycanthrope himself, and silver hand respect him for this. Maybe silver hand and circle were at peace because both respect Kodlack. Then mid point in quest Kodlack dies because and this causes Sliver hand and Companions to go war. The war is about who gets to do what to body. Circle wants to burn him in Skyforge so his body strengthens their weapons while Silver hand want to un-lycanthrope Kodlack and show everyone in Skyrim that Circle are ware wolfs.
Loving this video so far, but I did wanna say at around 7:16:00 that there is actually evidence of Hert and Hern killing travelers, they have a small butchery shed where if I can remember correctly, there's normal animal corpses, a troll skull, and also a human skull. I wanna say it was bloody too but I'd have to go back to look honestly. Nitpick aside I really do love this video, and as someone who's favorite run of the game was a pure mage I feel incredibly validated by your rant on magick in Skyrim lol. I had fun in vanilla with it but kinda like you I had more fun as a mage once I started exploiting. I did the jail armor exploit to equip multiple sets of armor and enchanted gear to decrease all my magicka costs to 0, which was incredibly fun once I got the master level lightning spell since I could down dragons so quickly with it. Love your video though ! Can't wait to watch the second part once I finish this behemoth of a video.
I know it's been a year but listening to these have been helpful getting through the night shift. THANKS FOR YOUR WORK
"there are no priests of nocturnal"
"what if the other priests find out we're not really priests?"
accidentally setting up a hilarious situation where every priest of nocturnal is afraid that the other priests will find out they're not really a priest of nocturnal
That's got to be a Family Guy skit somewhere
That's the plot of the man who was Thursday
Nobody's going to see this, but I just wanted to point out that Jyrik's staff is not ONLY a lightning staff with a restoration staff's model, but also casts a unique version of the lightning spell that no other weapon in the game can cast. Usually lightning weapons deal X damage to health and half as much to magicka; Jyrik's staff deals X damage to health and TWICE as much to magicka, making it surprisingly strong against other magic users - including dragons.
Hey you thought no one would see this, but I, another magic player, did!
I also wanted to point this out. Jyrik's staff is like a baby staff of magnus depending on when you get it, and it remains somewhat useful throughout the questline and definitely helps with morokei whenever you happen to fight him at a point where dragon priests are actually a threat.
My first Skyrim playthrough was a magic playthrough and it also put me into the Skyrim Limbo that I don't think ive ever woken up from... Very cool, wish it was told to the player. Wish I had some resource that could tell me all the unique unlisted weapon effects... maybe some kind of sheet that I could spread out and look at...
I saw dis
Ackschually
@@salmon_wine it is in the item description
i am 5 hours in, i cleaned, i cooked, i smoked a joint... or several, and i wasn´t bored once. exelent short little video.
Ironically these Skyrim retrospectives just make me want to play the game again, lol
That's because you are a dog
I hate skyrim for what it’s done to TES and bethesda games as a whole, the fact that it, in my opinion, ruined the lore around skyrim, made the gameplay formula even more shallow and boring than the previous games, and everything else. But I will never deny that I have fun playing the game, wandering around as a stealth archer and just completely turning my brain off for hours at a time as I just complete objectives and wander the scenery. It’s a very relaxing game and come back to it periodically
52:09 "Morrowind and Oblivion may have both started their fighter's factions with a rat quest, but Skyrim finishes its fighter's faction with infinite rat quests."
This really sums up Skyrim's quantity-over-quality ethos.
What's a rat quest?
@@nightcrwler1973 Have you seen Ratatouille? It's like that, but you're playing as Skinner
@@duanenaude5657 You get kidnapped by Rats and thrown in a Food Cellar?
@@nightcrwler1973 a quest where you're sent to deal with a rat problem
In Morrowind it's killing them
In oblivion it's saving them
@@nightcrwler1973 It's part of Skyrim's Radiant Quests System.
Can't wait for this 36-hour-long epic to fall asleep while listening to for the next month!
I go to sleep to a random chapter and continue watching whatever chapter is on when i wake up, its a pretty weird but awesome experience.
This, I love going to bed, putting on a video like this and relaxing while listening!
Another person with great taste I see haha.
I often put one of Patrician's elder scrolls videos on to go to sleep.
good stuff 👍
@@dportillo1 this is exactly what I do dude
@@dportillo1 I just go back to the chapter I last remember listening to before I fell asleep.
Something about seeing "A Quick Retrospective" for a 9 hour video that is just part 1 of a two part series, for some reason fills my heart with immeasurable amount of joy.
The magic rant is the best thing in the series yet im so glad even video essay ppl get upset over how garbage these companies choices have gotten
Your Elder Scrolls retrospectives helped me get through three months of hospital last November. Now, a year later, I get to look back at that time and enjoy a new instalment of your wonderful series. Thank you very much Pat!
Ya know what would've been an interesting climax of the college of winterhold questline? Using magic to raise the collapsed parts of winterhold from the sea, which opens up another side quest (or side questline) where you help rebuild winterhold.
Honestly, that's a cool idea, imagine if it gave you boons like a farm where what alchemy resources you cultivate give you like x4 the normal amount, so plucking a 1 nirnroot gives you 4, and so on.
I have thought about that too. Well rebuilding Winter hold and gaining the respect of the people that live there. It would make sense to have a quest like that, considering the damage the College did to the village.
One word: consoles
@@_zigger_ At the very mention, several aristocratic types guffaw in disgust and one lady faints.
Considering they even had to cut content from Rorikstead, I don't think this would've made the cut lmao
The writers truly do hate magic, as evidenced by their total lack of considering it as a factor for anything other than a get out of jail free card when they make a writing mistake.
Never is it a consideration in quest design. Clairvoyance to solve a riddle? No. Using the HEALING school of magic to HEAL SOMEONE in the MAGICAL faction? Of course not. No invisibility tie ins, no conjuring the dead.
But you better believe Bethesda will use magic to hand wave away plot holes when convenient.
I remember the first time I played Skyrim, I thought that sure the Conjuration school would provide me a horse, because what other convenience would be more obvious? Surely it isn't ALL combat summons. This is before dawnguard came and added a horse, but even then, why should I need to do a quest for one of the most basic necessities a mage would care for?
I am obsessed with this. I've seen it in full like 7 times.
Just 7?
@@baronvonbeandip Rookie numbers. Me, personally, I watched this well over 100 times buddy.
What gets me most about the companions is that when you transform for the first time, you're supposed to go on a rampage of Whiterun and kill a bunch of people before the companions manage to stop you. And when you return to Whiterun afterwards? There's not a single fucking thing in the entire 'city', not even a line from an NPC or a fucking notice on a wall somewhere, that even suggests a werewolf went rampaging through the cloud district and murdering a bunch of people. Not a SINGLE THING. The game reacted to this so poorly that for like 5 years I literally thought it was a dream sequence and didn't actually happen. But no. It did happen. Not only this, but it's suggested to have happened before with Farkas and probably others, and yet no-one in Whiterun seems to remember the fact that on multiple instances Werewolves have suddenly come out of Jorvaskr and started tearing people apart. Lmao.
There’s also the exit to the countryside outside the walls of Whiterun too. There should’ve been dialogue acknowledging how the player handled the immediate influx of a ton of power in the form of your werewolf form. One line would be about a werewolf tearing through Whiterun and, hopefully add some extra NPC’s and guards set to a low level to sell the power the player just gained, then have a separate line you can hear radiantly off a werewolf roaming the countryside.
I imagine that we were more stealthy and people just disappeared
Lmao, you could have just left whitrun by getting back into the underforge and leav through the cliff there without ever leaving any eye witnesses
On a sidenote, can we talk about how Whiterun is home to several daedric artifacts by the time we arrive and after we're done?
You've already got the Ebony Blade up in Dragons reach, just collecting dust in the basement. And then the Companions are hoarding a small shrine basically dedicated to Hircine under the Skyforge. And then we proceed to collect more relics of Hircine near the altar.
How is Whiterun not more cursed?
@@puppykitten4779 You can literally just stand there behind the hall and nobody comes after you, nobody can see you. I just sit there and wait till the transformation ends, every time.
When I saw the video length I thought this was going to be a bunch of filler and just recounting questlines without saying anything of substance, but no, it's actually 9 hours of thoughtful critique and commentary, very good work. Also massively agree with the anti-fast travel sentiment - even if fast traveling is "optional" as many say, games that are built with fast travel in mind have no reason to make the world compelling enough to traverse by foot. People think they want fast travel because we get lazy open-world games, but we get lazy open-world games because of fast travel.
One of the first times I played this game; I realized it gave me the option of fast traveling to helgen. Simply wait until Alduin is far enough away while you’re chilling in the tower with ulfric, and you can fast travel outside the gate. Of course, your hands are still bound but hey, you escaped
"Wait... that's illegal"
As a mage who morphed into a sneak mage, I feel heard.
I wanted to keep using magic, but it's not like mages were given a lot of choices.
I went through the entire transformation arc of starting off as a proud and upright mage, to becoming a stealth mage, to using a conjured bow to be technically still a mage while acting as a full blown stealth archer. It was harrowing.
@@notsae66 The most fun way to play mage, is to become a stealth archer. Ladies and Gentlemen, Skyrim.
All roads lead to stealth archery.
Jesus i played morrowing recently and the vast difference in magic is absolutely embarrassing for skyrim
@@heszedjim9699 oh man, the spellmaking in Morrowind had me hooked for so long
Mechanics Timestamps
43:35 - Radiant Quests
1:21:40 - Combat
2:17:59 - Stealth
3:46:35 - Magic
4:56:40 - Levelling
5:46:43 - Dungeons
6:24:36 - Alchemy & Enchanting
8:46:01 - UI
8:54:39 - Music
Thank you very very much for this
someone fell asleep to this!
Holy fuck, he just rages about magic for 5 hours solid? Fuck this game lmao
The magic gap… jesus
5 hour magic gap...
This should be required viewing for the TES 6 devs
Skyrim is the most face-value writing. No intrigue, no subversion, and certainly no love of its lore. The game frustrates me to no end, and when you got angry about magic, I was right there with you. I held the same exact complaints for years, especially since I went into Skyrim in 2011 planning to play a mage.
I play a warrior in Daggerfall, a spellsword in Morrowind, and an archer in Oblivion- I wanted Skyrim to be my mage. Nope.
The rant about how garbage pure magic builds are in Skyrim was nice to hear.
They're not just badly balanced, they're very poorly designed. It was so obvious they didn't expect people to not use a melee weapon of some kind even as a mage.
The only exception is using a cloak spell then using invisibility so you slowwwwwwwly damage everything but they can't see you so they just stand there slowly dying.
@@UsingGorillaLogic The problem that you have to chees the game with magic to not be too weak.
@@reactiondavant-garde3391 which is why I said slowwwwwwwly because it was me agreeing magic sucks.
@@UsingGorillaLogic It i not about being fast, the problem that you have to chees it, if it was fast it would be bad. As Patricion said, the magic too weak or too strong nothing in between.
The only time i had fun with a pure mage build was when i installed mods that
-increased the number of equippable rings
- added spells that enabled me to turn full soulstones into empty ones of the next higher tier
- changed charging spell animations
- had fully functional dragon wings.
- added time dilation spells.
And changed that wards worked like shields in addition to reducing magic damage.
Not all heroes wear Colovian Fur Helms. Congrats on getting it done, Patrician.
This is my 3rd time listening to this little retrospective. You have a really good style, I wish you would make long form content though
It's ungodly impressive how a 9 hour video can get a million views in a month, I'm already 1 hour in and it feels like only 10 minutes have passed. I mean all of this as a compliment.
It's not often though of but people tend to go to longer vids cause they can return and rewatch parts and put more faith in longer vids cause well they gotta have it that long for a reason right?
@@TheReZisTLust True, it's also less work to let one play while you're doing work and you don't have to worry for what's coming next.
I prefer long videos that have something to say, as you can listen for ages with little imput until you feel the need to comment and interact; over short videos that throw out little content and require you to search for something else, or that you have to watch 3 times before finishing your comment.
Я люблю Максимум полчаса , ну может один час , 9 часов это смотреть в несколько заходов , и потом уже забываешь что было и забрасываешь
That’s because his arguments are so meandering and without narrative consequences. It’s like a 10th grader who hasn’t read the book: his report is kinda pointless, full of repetitions and dead ends.
I think the reason so few people mention how you're not given the option to not become a werewolf, is because they knew the game had crappy stories, and just being railroaded into the decision was just something they were already prepared to go along with.
It's not that people were too stupid to notice. It's that people were too jaded to care. "This plot line makes me become a werewolf? Well, alright I guess. I'm sure I'll have the option to cure it down the line because Skyrim never makes you commit to your choices."
Too true. It's like knowing the GM won't actually kill off your character so you lose all investment in the diegesis.
This!👆
Listening to this while doing another playthrough of Skyrim.
You're right on so many levels. But Skyrim still got me.
Noone knows why we love it but goddamit god Howard is alluring
Here I was, sleeping peacefully in ignorance. Until at 8:04:00 my ears were suddenly bleeding and the sheer volume of his screaming. Thank you
Thank you, I knew about this being in one of his videos and wanted to remove it from my playlist.
I sincerely hate when TH-camrs do that.
I'm glad I know. Thank you
I submitted a Sponsorblock segment so that anyone with Sponsorblock should hopefully skip that part.
Or how about "BETRAYAL!!! BEEETRAYALLLL!!"
You can just listen to ASMR if you are trying to fall asleep.
I remember being confused by the charcoal/paper thing in the Thieves Guild quest because it was so out of character for the rest of the game. Skyrim had never asked me to solve a puzzle, so I was absolutely stuck when it suddenly dropped a vague hint instead of a clear quest marker. (and of course I couldn't be completely sure it wasn't just a bug)
Same, I legit considered that skyrim design was slowly rotting my brain. I usually pretty fast on picking those things up
Well that "puzzle" in particular is very in line with thieves in general, getting information when you can't take the book or slab itself.
What about that bigger Dwemer sphere to charge the lexicon or whatever. That thing was kinda confusing, at least it was 11 years ago as a young kid
I bet someone at Bethesda genuinely forgot to put that quest marker in, or a bug prevented it appearing in the game and nobody at Bethesda has fixed it since.
There are so few examples of a puzzle like this one (albeit extremely simple) in this entire game! It's bizarre. It's a shame the puzzles in these games are withering away.
@@ghastlyanarchy1720 Yeah, but it was out of character for the GAME maybe not the guild. It's completely random and out of place imo
For the Dark Brotherhood quest where you kill the vampire couple, the cabin a bit away from the house contains skulls and bloody rags, showing they've been killing travelers
if you talk to the wife she very not-so-subtly hints that too:
"Other people just make things complex. Out here, Hern and I can get everything we need from the occasional traveler."
Me when bare bones world building
@@puppppppppppuuuuu6205 BYEEEE 💀
At least it feels more alive than Morrowind. I love Morrowind but damn it feels so dead static npcs, walls of text (I don’t mind too much but it can be a bit overwhelming sometimes), while Morrowind does a lot of things right I feel less immersed cause there’s usually only a handful of interesting things to see. Compare that to Oblivion when you randomly come across an oblivion gate or in Skyrim when you see that gigantic distant ruin and people in the town talk about it
@@brycekrispiez714 Yeah, the best course of action would have been to have all the good things integrated from all games, but I'm sure there is a myriad of things against that idea, seeing how massive these games tend to be; although Obsidian managed to do great world building in 18 months, so it is hard to say how much is bad management and incompetence.
I have to bring this up. I think it was Tim Cain who explained that when one of the other members of Black Isle took Fallout home and play tested it, they told him that they wanted to see more than just numbers going up when they levelled up. That was the true origin of the perk system, apparently. And the concept of horizontal progression. I have a difficult time believing that a mod that is essentially nothing but numbers going up every level would do anything to improve the game. Being able to choose a perk like being able to pickpocket people whilst you are standing right in front of them and nobody else notices (which is how real pickpockets work) would be a real improvement.
I feel like his glancing over the ordinator perk mod was pretty basic. Honestly there's tons of really interesting perks for all the skills. The conjuration tree alone was the basis for my last playthrough as "King Of Bones" and all its relevant perks let me make a small skeleton army. The melee trees add a ton of new ways to use those fighting styles even if it does boil down to additional ways of doing damage. Still worth checking out for sure though. Ordinator revitalized Skyrim for me.
When i saw the video lenght i was expecting it to be quantity over quality, much like skyrim. Never been so happy to be wroung. Excellent video!
it's spelled "wrong", not "wroung".
The Aventus Aretino problem could have been solved by just having the rumor be "Hey, did you hear about that kid who ran away from that otphanage? Wonder where he went", making it possible that by the time you find him he had just begun performing the Black Sacrament. But I guess they had to dangle that Dark Brotherhood story right in front of the players' face to slap them with it.
And they got way worse at doing that in Fallout 4, start you in the corner of the map with only 1 direction then make it impossible to miss dogmeat, you felt like you earned him in FO3, bethesda are getting worse at rewarding the player for simply buying a game from them.
The Way We Look at Things
You should know this, Timothy, that in the last days there will be very difficult times.
-2 Timothy 3:1
Someone said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
A Christian worldview will affect the way that we see everything. And why is this important? Because we are living in the last days. Jesus Christ is coming back again. And if ever there was a time when we need to know our Bibles and have a close walk with Christ, the time is now.
Describing the end times, the apostle Paul said, “In the last days there will be very difficult times. For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred. They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control”
(2 Timothy 3:1-3)
Paul went on to say, “They will be cruel and hate what is good. They will betray their friends, be reckless, be puffed up with pride, and love pleasure rather than God. They will act religious, but they will reject the power that could make them godly”
(verses 3-5)
Is that not an accurate assessment of the times in which we are living? The United States has never been more spiritual yet more immoral. We throw the word spiritual around a lot. But do we know what it means?
We live in an age when we can write our own apps and customize our home screens. We can keep the stuff we like and throw out the things we don’t. And we carry that thinking into other aspects of our lives. The result is something called moral relativism.
Moral relativism is the belief that there are no absolutes. There is no right or wrong. Moral relativism teaches that we are all products of the evolutionary process and not made by a Creator God. There is no devil. There is no good or evil. And there is no plan or purpose for our lives.
Moral relativism also teaches that we are all basically good, and if we happen to go bad, then it’s because we’re simply products of our environment. It teaches that we make our own truth.
For instance, if you believe in a God of love, forgiveness, and mercy, you can keep that. But if you’re offended by the biblical teaching of a God of holiness, righteousness, and judgment, you can delete that. It works out perfectly. Or so it seems.
Moral relativism may sound fine in theory. But what if we were to put it into practice? Will a god of our own making be able to save us in the final day? Of course not.
A biblical worldview says there is a God as revealed in the Bible, and the Bible alone is the authority and source of that belief. It is not what we feel or what is popular, acceptable, or perceived as cool. It is what the Bible says.
@@tw0crows74That’s wild because I never found him in either games
@@faith9505And Christians wonder why they are hated. Stop spamming your bullshit on videos that have nothing to do with your religion.
@imtoogoodatpvp1252 you missed the dog in fallout 4 that is in red rocket truck stop the second place you visit after the leaving the vault.
Regarding the conversation about Ulfric as a "Stormcloak asset": my interpretation upon discovering this dossier wasn't that Ulfric was a ally, former or otherwise, of the Thalmor. Rather, his existence is useful to the Thalmor, and while Ulfric's goals are separate from whatever the Aldmeri Dominion might be pursuing, the manner in which he is attempting to achieve those goals is very convenient for Thalmor purposes. Not a direct agent, but still a pawn.
But in the same times it is saying that they don't want a Stormcloak victory, so I think they are really just for a prolonged conflict and nothing else. Basicly Ulfric is usefull if he couldn't win or too strong to lose, if the balance broken the Thalmor is in a bad situation.
@@reactiondavant-garde3391 Right, but as long as that balance isn't broken (and before the Last Dragonborn shows up, there's no sign that it will be), Ulfric simply being alive helps the Thalmor out.
@@ArchasTL Yes, I agree.
I am actually surprised Pat never guessed that out. That's the first thing that comes up in mind when you read "an asset". Because that takes like three seconds of logical conclusions to get to the point you've made. Pat sometimes is so bad it's just not even funny.
@@kommandantwunder6785 I mean Patrician made this point just doesn't made in this form, when he say that the unresolved Civil War is good for the Thalmor he makeing this exact point.
The talk about realism in the leveling is a good point. So many people complain about "realism" or "realistic" but forget that those terms are tied to the reality of what you are describing!
In Skyrim, it is realistic to need defenses against monsters. Helms Reach is literally a building designed to trap a dragon. There are spells designed to turn undead. These were realistic problems that the world addressed.
It is a fair thing to bring up when there is an obvious, realistic solution in world to a problem, that is just ignored. Because that is stupid. Like the fact it isn't realistic that the silence spell... doesn't exist. That would be insanely useful and is already something that exists in lore.
Regarding the skills, it is always about being consistent with the ideas in the world. If the world has people who train for decades to master a skill, than why not have the player be required to use those skills to improve. Personally, it is one of the more interesting ideas Skyrim and the Elder Scrolls uses, since it can make a character feel like they are growing as you play more gradually. The downside is the representations of that growth are shockingly small. If anything, the system itself isn't bad, it is just very poorly implemented and shallow to accurately portray the scale of the game.
Funny thing that happened yo me in my firat playthrough of the thieves guild: So i kill Mercer and the place is flooding, Karliah and whats-his-name are going all like, "well this is the end" but then i, pretending to be my character, say "Yeah about that, I kinda have a dragon priest mask that lets me breathe under water soooo, fuck you guys!" Then i went under water to equip the mask. However, upon looking into my inventory, the mask was not there, I had left the mask at home. So i slowly come back up to the water surface and go, "Heyyy guyyysss... so about earlier.", then my brother who was watching me play pretended to be one of them shouting, "KILL HIM." and then the exit opened up. Was very funny and i still look back to that time as a fun moment playing skyrim.
Lmao
The mod "Serana Dialog Add-on" gives her dialog after the Companions werewolf bit where she calls them all terrible people for hazing you into a daedric ritual with Hircine and then angrily refuses to take part in some of the other quests and waits outside. Of course makes sense for her character to be angry seeing because of how she became a vampire.
Unfortunately the mod still has to work within the confines of Skyrim's vanilla quests so she doesn't get to the point where she gets so mad she leaves, but I thought it was nice seeing that some mod authors agree with you about that moment being nonsensical in-story.
Is it voiced?
@@satanamogila9251yes
Honestly serana dialogue addon actively makes her character worse and that's saying something as she's an awful character to begin with
@@lillycline1414 based
@@lillycline1414 I enjoyed her character from what I remember, but I really don't like how the mod devolves into full on fan fiction where she gets way too obsessed with the player character. Also her not marrying the player character was a choice by the writers that I feel was a correct one to fit her character.